“Once upon a time, schools could hope that children would go into the world, knowing how to do what they were taught. In a rapidly-changing world, they have to go out, knowing how to do what they were not taught that is to say, that to go out was the skill of learning to do […]
“If I think in terms of my three books on this subject, when Mindstorms was written there were barely any computers in schools. Throughout the 1980s many schools got in the act, acquiring computers. The most important phenomenon I understood at that time was the power of school, as an institution, to assimilate anything new
“The computer greatly expands what is in the culture of the child’s life. What the computer does is to make it possible for natural learning, which really means learning without teaching, without being taught, to be extended [exposed] to a much greater range of knowledge. I think we see when kids learn by themselves, to
“My first reaction to Tinkering Towards Utopia was adversarial. I am convinced that education will undergo the kind of megachange that came in the wake of technological and scientific developments in areas such as medicine. Yet as Koschmann pointed out in the introduction to this section, although Tyack and Cuban present their work as analysis
“I believe that school is an unnatural way for learning. I believe that natural learning is what happens before school and after school. But there are many things that can’t be learned in the environment of the home. School became necessary because some things are not imbedded in the culture of our daily lives so
“In New York City there is a growing number of classrooms, I believe nearly fifty now, where future and past seem to meet. In the front a chalkboard: a teacher talking, perhaps about sentences, perhaps about ratios, in the middle desks: children sitting, some listening, some dreaming. Familiar. At the back something different. Two computers
“How do we make writing become hard fun? One way is to develop for kids “writable” activities that they love to do. The building of robotic devices acquires “writability” because it lends itself to stage-by-stage description. Its writability is further enhanced by the use of word processors and digital cameras. But beyond technology there is
“Of course I’d known about Piaget before I met him. In fact, just about a month before I met him I had quite a violent fight with a friend about how bad Piaget was. Until I met him I focused mainly on the Piaget who speaks about what children can’t do – they can’t learn
“People often congratulate me for making such a good language for children. But they are wrong. Logo isn’t a “good language for children”–in fact, a language that was “good for children” in this limited sense would not be good for children. Children deserve a language that is good, period. Logo is only good for children
“One of my central mathetic tenets is that the construction that takes place “in the head” often happens especially felicitously when it is supported by construction of a more public son “in the world” – a sand castle or a cake, a LEGO house or a corporation, a computer program, a poem, or a theory