February 7, 2012
Paul A. Soderdahl of Iowa City, Iowa contacted me to share two quotes he wrote down during a Seymour Papert speech delivered in Newton, Iowa April 29, 1999. Here is one of those quotes: “We train tigers, not teachers.”
Paul A. Soderdahl of Iowa City, Iowa contacted me to share two quotes he wrote down during a Seymour Papert speech delivered in Newton, Iowa April 29, 1999. Here is one of those quotes: “We train tigers, not teachers.”
“If I think in terms of my three books on this subject, when Mindstorms was written there were barely any computers in schools. Throughout the 1980s many schools got in the act, acquiring computers. The most important phenomenon I understood at that time was the power of school, as an institution, to assimilate anything new
“My first reaction to Tinkering Towards Utopia was adversarial. I am convinced that education will undergo the kind of megachange that came in the wake of technological and scientific developments in areas such as medicine. Yet as Koschmann pointed out in the introduction to this section, although Tyack and Cuban present their work as analysis
“I believe that school is an unnatural way for learning. I believe that natural learning is what happens before school and after school. But there are many things that can’t be learned in the environment of the home. School became necessary because some things are not imbedded in the culture of our daily lives so
“Imagine a party of time travelers, among them a group of surgeons and a group of school teachers, who came from the last century to see how things are done in our days. Think of the bewilderment of the surgeons when they find themselves in the operating room of a modem hospital! The nineteenth-century surgeons
“Imagine a society in which there were schools, but writing had not yet been invented, so there are no books and there are no pencils. People teach verbally and they learn by listening. It’s possible. One day somebody invents writing, and they invent the pencil. Somebody says, “Wow, this would be great for education, it
“In New York City there is a growing number of classrooms, I believe nearly fifty now, where future and past seem to meet. In the front a chalkboard: a teacher talking, perhaps about sentences, perhaps about ratios, in the middle desks: children sitting, some listening, some dreaming. Familiar. At the back something different. Two computers
“How do we make writing become hard fun? One way is to develop for kids “writable” activities that they love to do. The building of robotic devices acquires “writability” because it lends itself to stage-by-stage description. Its writability is further enhanced by the use of word processors and digital cameras. But beyond technology there is
“Of course I’d known about Piaget before I met him. In fact, just about a month before I met him I had quite a violent fight with a friend about how bad Piaget was. Until I met him I focused mainly on the Piaget who speaks about what children can’t do – they can’t learn
“People often congratulate me for making such a good language for children. But they are wrong. Logo isn’t a “good language for children”–in fact, a language that was “good for children” in this limited sense would not be good for children. Children deserve a language that is good, period. Logo is only good for children