“I have described myself as an educational utopian — not because I have projected a future of education in which children are surrounded by high technology, but because I believe that certain uses of very powerful computational technology and computational ideas can provide children with new possibilities for learning, thinking, and growing emotionally as well […]
“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
“The failure of past reformers to bring about dramatically better learning has armed those within the educational establishment with the argument that future proposals will prove no more capable of bringing about radically improved learning. Some may well believe that the best argument against megachange is this: If it has so long been so desperately
“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
“This praise for the concrete is not to be confused with a strategy of using it as a stepping-stone to the abstract. That would leave the abstract ensconced as the ultimate form of knowing. I want to say something more controversial and more subtle in helping to demote abstract thinking from being seen as “the
“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
“My vision of a new kind of learning environment demands free contact between children and computers. This could happen because the child’s family buys one or a child’s friends have one. For purposes of discussion here (and to extend our discussion to all social groups) let us assume that it happens because schools give every
September 29, 2011 Read More »
“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 »