“Every deep thinker who has looked at our education system, and I think of everyone, from Voltaire, Rousseau, Piaget, Vygostgy, John Dewey, they’ve all focused on one point, that our school is much too focused on information, on getting facts, far to little on doing things, on learning by doing, by action.” Papert, S. (2004) […]
“The girl who said to her teacher “I want to do that” and the first grader who said to the third grader “show me how to do that” are just two out of hundreds of documented examples of children refusing the “infantalization” inherent in most contemporary schooling. These children refused to do what children are
Note: This is a future vision for education, not a report on the present… “School is a place where students learn largely by working on projects that come from their own interests — their own visions of a place where they want to be, a thing they want to make or a subject they want
“Part of learning is getting information. Somebody stands in front of the classroom and preaches, and information is somehow flowing into people’s heads, or so it is said. But that’s only one part of education. The other part, which Dewey would have emphasized, is about doing things, making things, constructing things. However, in our school
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
“…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