In honor of Valentine’s Day… “Closely related to appropriation is another word, love. Einstein said, “Love is a better master than duty.” This is often forgotten in many of the modern theories of education. Take cognitive science, for example. I don’t think the people who gave it that name meant any harm, but in psychology, […]
“Well, first thing you have to do is to give up the idea of curriculum. Curriculum meaning you have to learn this on a given day. Replace it by a system where you learn this where you need it. So that means we’re going to put kids in a position where they’re going to use
On the NCTM Standards….. “I think they [the Standards] are going in the right direction but they are incredibly conservative, from my point of view. But again, I’d make reservation that if one has to work within the framework for schools as they are and curriculum as it is, maybe there isn’t very much room
“I contrast this with a sex education class I witnessed in a school. Teacher produces a diagram showing the plumbing of human genitalia and gives a lesson full of physiological information. I could almost hear him ticking off in his mind the “content” that has to be “covered” in the lesson plan. Meechai didn’t teach
“My thesis could be summarized as: What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate. Because it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes.” Papert, S. (1981). Mindstorms:
“The phrase, “technology and education” usually means inventing new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in a thinly disguised version of the same old way. Moreover, if the gadgets are computers, the same old teaching becomes incredibly more expensive and biased towards its dumbest parts, namely the kind of rote learning in which measurable
“…Only inertia and prejudice, not economics or lack of good educational ideas stand in the way of providing every child in the world with the kinds of experience of which we have tried to give you some glimpses. If every child were to be given access to a computer, computers would be cheap enough for
“We emphasize that it is possible to create activities that connect many different students’ interests to various curricular areas, and to connect “separate” disciplines to each other. Our goal was, and continues to be, to create learning situations in which connections are allowed to develop freely and to move in any direction, albeit many or
“NCTM [National Council of Teachers of Mathematics] has not yet understood the role of computers. NCTM still belongs to maybe the 20th century, if not long before. I think they call it totally wrong. I think that the reason why there is a conflict between creative thinking, and basic mathematics is that they try to
It is this freedom of the teacher to decide and, indeed, the freedom of the children to decide, that is most horrifying to the bureaucrats who stand at the head of current education systems. They are worried about how to verify that the teachers are really doing their job properly, how to enforce accountability and