“Q: So far, we have only talked about access to the Internet. Would you speculate on how other technologies could affect American education? Dr. Papert: I was not talking about access to the Internet. I was talking about something much deeper in which computers serve as materials for construction as well as providing access to
“Some of my colleagues are disappointed that School manages to so dilute the ideas or so circumscribe their impact that they can be “integrated” into an essentially unchanged system. I have learned to see things differently through my Piaget-trained eyes. At the core of Piaget’s theory of development is the process he calls assimilation: when
“With the wisdom of hindsight, it seems clear now that the difficulties encountered by such curriculum reform as the New Math were aggravated by the reactions of parents and teachers to the new things the children were learning. The parents often perceived the new math as strange, as alien to them; they often responded to
“Although printed in 1970, “Teaching Children Thinking” was conceived in 1968 and bears the signs of the heady atmosphere of that time. Across the society change was in the air, deeply rooted assumptions were being challenged. On a smaller and less active but not less radical scale challenges to taken-for-granted ideas about children, about education
“The question that makes the difference between being optimistic or pessimistic about what is happening in schools is whether getting the ideas into the system in simplified form prepares the way for the deeper form or betrays it. I say, “Marry the man today and change his ways tomorrow!”” Papert, Seymour (2005). You can’t think
“Ten years before T.H.E. Journal was launched [1972], Logo was designed as a programming language that could be accessible to children. The spirit of the enterprise was like the way the Wright brothers approached aviation: I thought of giving children the power to program computers as a tiny first step in a complex process whose
“One can take two approaches to renovating School — or indeed anything else. The problem-solving approach identifies the many problems that afflict individual schools and tries to solve them. A systemic approach requires one to step back from the immediate problems and develop an understanding of how the whole thing works. Educators faced with day-to-day
“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
“Since the prevailing image of the computer is that of a logical machine, and since programming is seen as a technical and mathematical activity, the existence of anything but an analytic approach in this area makes a dramatic argument for pluralism. But the computer’s most specific contribution to the critique of canonical styles depends on
“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