“By asking questions such as: “What’s the best way to teach science,” there’s an implication that there’s a single entity that can make that decision. It’s not like that, maybe never was.” Moore, A. (1998) Seymour Papert quoted in archived article, Targets Hit, Targets Missed — Seymour Papert, chronicling his speech at the October 1998 […]
“It [education] is analogous to a market-driven economy. Like Darwinian evolution, numerous interplays allow many results to organically emerge. How do we intervene in this divergent, organic, apparently chaotic system? As in a “free market” the government doesn’t tell us how many nails to produce, but it does intervene in the economy; the FDA doesn’t
“Games never advertise as being easy; rather, how difficult. Kid never say schools is too hard; they say it’s boring. Yet we still insist on “making it easier.” Game designers know that if games aren’t hard, they will go out business. Well, curriculum designers must make it easy to get through, to encourage more curriculum
“Information technology is the wrong name, and leads to its misuse. The fact that you can get a lot of information out of the Net is NOT merely what it’s about. Most digital technologies — processors and chips, for example — are not about information at all. They are constructional medium…we make things from them.
“Because in our popular culture the informational side of the computer is the side that is most familiar and most useful, it has the tendency to strengthen that side of our education system. Now that’s good to strengthen it, but it’s also had the effect of pushing the balance over, away from the constructional side.”
“Every deep thinker who has looked at our education system, and I think of everyone, from Voltaire, Rousseau, Piaget, Vygostgy, John Dewey, they’ve all focused on one point, that our school is much too focused on information, on getting facts, far to little on doing things, on learning by doing, by action.” Papert, S. (2004)