“Education in this country is a centralized command system, rather like the Soviet Union’s was. There they tried to run an economy by making decisions in a central place and applying the same criteria and standards to everybody. It collapsed because it couldn’t work.”
“Maybe we should turn the Department of Education into a Department of Learning—a place whose function would be to encourage learning rather than regulate education.”
“Interactivity conjures up a sense of reaction—I do something, you react, I react, etc. This makes the computer too much the active agent rather than the medium or the material. We should think of the computer as what you make something out of, or a medium that gives you the opportunity to express yourself and access what other people have expressed.”
“I would like for us to recover the image of learning we see in very young children—learning by exploring the world. I think scientists and creative people learn like children do. Learning should be about becoming more skilled at exploration, detached from the right and wrong and the given propositions like that the Battle of Waterloo took place in 1815, and that 3 times 7 is 21.”
“People give lip service to learning to learn, but if you look at curriculum in schools, most of it is about dates, fractions, and science facts; very little of it is about learning. I like to think of learning as an expertise that every one of us can acquire.”
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