“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 »
“Q: But there are statistics to show that in most cases technology in schools doesn’t work. A: The statisticians ask a silly question and get a silly answer. Of course “technology doesn’t work.” Technology doesn’t do anything. People do. Statistics that lump together technology implementations across the board — averaging the good with the bad
September 22, 2012 Read More »
“School as we set it up is tailor-made for certain personality types. I like to think of certain scales of oppositions: like obsessional-compulsives and hysterics. This is a little over-simplified. but will help us talk quickly. Our hyperactive child is toward the extreme end of the hysteric scale. The hysteric likes generalities, likes dramatic effects,
September 21, 2011 Read More »
Video of Seymour Papert on “Idea Aversion” from 2009 interview One of theses clips should play on your device!
September 20, 2011 Read More »
In 1990, Louise C. Orlando of Teaching and Computers, a long defunct magazine, asked Seymour Papert what most would consider a softball question based on a contemporary education craze of that period. Interviewer: What do you think of cooperative learning? Papert: I think it’s very bad when students are forced to work in groups. But,
September 19, 2012 Read More »
“The scandal of education is that every time you teach something you deprive a child of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.” Papert, S. (1996) The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press. page 68.
September 15, 2011 Read More »
“If you’ve seen kids with computers, you know that there’s no better catalyst to share ideas. It’s a much more socializing experience than either school, which isolates kids, or television, which doesn’t encourage any socialization. The computer encourages kids to have conversations with one another.” Papert, S. (1997) in “Computing’s Idealist A chat with Seymour
September 14, 2011 Read More »
There won’t be schools in the future…. I think the computer will blow up the school. That is, the school defined as something where there are classes, teachers running exams, people structured in groups by age, following a curriculum-all of that. The whole system is based on a set of structural concepts that are incompatible
September 13, 2011 Read More »
“I think it’s better to put 100 computers in one percent of the schools than one computer in 100 percent of the schools.” Seymour Papert in Sullivan, N. (1984 ) “Seymour Papert, the Inventor of Logo has a Lot of Interesting Ideas” [interview]. Family PC Magazine. February 1984. Volume 2. Number 2. pp 70.
September 12, 2011 Read More »
“So, I think the first impact of paper on education is that we’ve created a form of school and of learning that means that people with certain kinds of personalities, certain structures, neurological structures, take to it well and succeed, and some of them take to it less well and don’t succeed, and some of