“The supervaluation of abstract thinking vitiates discussion of educational issues. The reason is that educators who advocate imposing abstract ways of thinking on students almost always practice what they preach—as I tried to do in adopting a concrete style of writing—but with very different effects. A simple example is seen in the formulation of research
“The majority of the students were in special education classes both inside the facility and in regular school. Typically, in special education the process stays within the standard school epistemological framework, often presenting much the same material just slower and with more personal attention. We were trying to make a more fundamental change by focusing
“This procedure gave a way to introduce powerful ideas such as mechanical advantage and torque not in an abstract way but in a concrete, connected way. The students found the ideas powerful because they enabled them to achieve what they wanted. A procedure that directs attention to the limiting factors not only models a productive
“After World War I Piaget moved to Zurich to attend Carl Jung’s lectures on experimental psychology, and then to Paris to study logic and abnormal psychology. Working with Théodore Simon in Alfred Binet’s child psychology lab, he noticed that Parisian children of the same age made similar errors on true-false intelligence tests. Fascinated by their
“I’d like to make a very clear distinction between how you think as a revolutionary, not someone who wishes to force change, but someone who looks far enough ahead and sees that there is going to be change. There is going to be fundamental change. And the big question that I would like to raise
“Here’s a little curious thing that I’ve recently become intrigued by. I worked during the 80s developing a way of children doing robotics using LEGO and eventually LEGO made this thing that they marketed under the name of my book Mindstorms which is build LEGO but instead of LEGO just being an architectural passive thing
“In my view, a key to the current trends of discussion about technology and education is an ironic fact about the imbalance between informational and constructional. Whereas the most qualitatively original contribution digital technology could make to education lies in redressing the imbalance, in fact the imbalance is increased by popular perception that so strongly
“By asking questions such as: “What’s the best way to teach science,” there’s an implication that there’s a single entity that can make that decision. It’s not like that, maybe never was.” Moore, A. (1998) Seymour Papert quoted in archived article, Targets Hit, Targets Missed — Seymour Papert, chronicling his speech at the October 1998
“It [education] is analogous to a market-driven economy. Like Darwinian evolution, numerous interplays allow many results to organically emerge. How do we intervene in this divergent, organic, apparently chaotic system? As in a “free market” the government doesn’t tell us how many nails to produce, but it does intervene in the economy; the FDA doesn’t
We describe four major milestones in our development: 1. In the late sixties we recognized that while computers have tremendous potential for use in education, the technology of that time was marginally effective and too expensive. We consequently adopted a strategy of preparing for a future which has now arrived 2. For the first half