“Imagine a party of time travelers from an earlier century, among them one group of surgeons and another of schoolteachers, each group eager to see how much things have changed in their profession a hundred or more years in the future. Imagine the bewilderment of the surgeons finding themselves in the operating room of a modern hospital. Although they would know that an operation of some sort was being performed, and might even be able to guess at the target organ, (the rest) would be utterly unfamiliar to them.
“The time traveling teachers would respond very differently to a modern elementary school classroom. They might be puzzled by a few strange objects. They might notice that some standard techniques had changedand would likely disagree among themselves about whether the changes they saw were for the better or the worsebut they would fully see the point of most of what was being attempted and could quite easily take over the class.”
—From Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine, pp. 1–2
Seymour Papert Related Stories:
- Time Travelers
- Blocks, Sand, LEGO, and Computers
- The Gifted and Talented Kids Who Couldn’t Weigh a Giraffe
- Genuine Multimedia
- How Children Learn
- Seymour Papert Quotes
Source:
Papert, S. (1995). Seymour Papert: Learning through Building and Exploring (The Multimedia Today Interview). Multimedia Today. http://www.multimedia.hosting.ibm.com/mmtoday/magazine/papert-1.html