“This neat picture of successive stages has aroused such strong positive and negative reactions that the ensuing debates have obscured Piaget’s really important contribution: His description of different ways of knowing is far more important than quibbling about whether they neatly follow one another chronologically. And what is especially important is the description of the […]
“The best learning is learning that is embraced and enjoyed. Children love to learn until they are taught otherwise. Indeed even then, while most people may hate being taught, I believe that everyone, especially every child, always likes learning.” Papert, S. (1996) The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press. page 51.
“Once upon a time, schools could hope that children would go into the world, knowing how to do what they were taught. In a rapidly-changing world, they have to go out, knowing how to do what they were not taught that is to say, that to go out was the skill of learning to do
“These observations lead to a strategy for those who wish to contribute to improving “education.” Forget about making games to teach children multiplication or spelling or any of those old-fashioned basic skills. The really basic skill today is the skill of learning, and the best use of games is to leverage their tendency to enhance
“Serious players of video games get their glory largely from being the first on the block to master the game that just came out, and this means that kids have a powerful incentive to get good at learning well and quickly. But the games provide more than incentive. They also provide excellent exercises for practicing
“And at the same time that this massive penetration of the technology is taking place, there is a social movement afoot with great relevance for the politics of education. There is an increasing disillusion with traditional education. Some people express this by extreme action, actually withdrawing their children from schools and choosing to educate them
“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
“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
“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 »
“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 »