Teachers were once among the most respected members of their communities — often the most respected. This position is slipping as schools deteriorate and lose their social function. Some visions of the role of technology in education, for example, the image of the best teacher as a distant teacher, further undermine respect for teachers and […]
“Frankly, I think that it is downright immoral to trick children into learning and doing math when they think they are just playing an innocent game. To make the situation worse (as if anything can be worse than lying to children), the deception does not achieve any purpose, since cooperative learners who know what they
“I am convinced that the way children learn will improve dramatically and often find myself fighting fiercely with those who say computers have little to offer in this area or will do actual harm by immersing children in artificial worlds at the expense of spending time with nature. Yet when I visit a school, ninety-nine
“To skeptics who might ridicule seeing learning as the most important issue in a deeply troubled world, I will only say that none of the world’s troubles will be resolved unless people, especially those of the next generation, learn to think in better ways than those who brought the troubles about. Having said this I
“I am no Pollyanna about technology. The record of how society took up earlier technologies is frighteningly bad. We first made automobiles in the hundreds of millions and then worried about how to mend the damage done by deforming our cities, polluting our atmosphere and changing the lives of our teenage children. Why should we
“I’m going to pick on one little corner of school, namely mathematics. I am a mathematician, so it is easy for me to talk about math, but what I have said applies to everything. Now in mathematics the dominating feature is the content. I recently did a little research on what discussion there is in
My old friend, Ihor Charischak, shared this four minute clip in which Seymour Papert addresses the “suicidal” tendencies of teacher training and calls for more thought to being given to the “art of learning.” “When they went to school, the first thing they [children] had to learn was to stop learning and to begin being
“But throwing out entrenched, misleading ideas and providing children with open access to computers is not enough in itself. We also need a whole new set of concepts and paradigms for studying the learning process in this burgeoning computer age. What I am saying about computers is no doubt true about other materials and other
September 28, 2011 Read More »
“An answer to the dilemma is suggested by looking back at the first years of a child’s life, when a volcano of learning takes place with nobody “putting the kid right” or “telling the real explanation.” Why doesn’t the learning of these toddlers run wild? Although they do come to hold beliefs in words or
September 27, 2011 Read More »
“The ridiculous situation where supply and demand exist but cannot meet comes from the commitment to uniformity in schools. In most countries the uniformity works at a national level: A ministry of education would have to decide to adopt the new idea. In the United States there is a decentralized system that allows each town
September 26, 2011 Read More »