The following excerpt of Seymour Papert speaking comes from a videodisc produced by the MIT Media Lab circa 1986-87. Transcript Seymour Papert: This is an attempt to make a sketch of what a school of the future might be like. Now, nobody really knows what the future will be like, but we know what it …
“They first learn engineering, then from there they progress to learning the ideas behind it, and then they learn the mathematics. This would be inventing, it’s a little probe toward inventing a different kind of content. It’s not a different way of teaching; it’s not pedagogy. It’s different knowledge. It’s a good example of turning …
“More than 20 years ago, I was working on a project at the Muzzey Junior High School in Lexington, MA, which had been persuaded by Wally Feuerzeig to allow a seventh grade to “do Logo” instead of math for that year. This was a brave decision for a principal who could not have known that …
“Almost all parents think that it is a good thing for their kids to do something called “learning math” and are therefore in the market for software that will “teach kids math.” So far, so good. But what is not so good is that their ideas about what math is, and why the kids should …
“In 1971 Channel 5, a local Boston TV station, produced a program on children in new learning situations and included a segment on Logo. Here is that segment. My one regret is that Seymour was not talking with a child during the filming. By the way I am indebted to youTube and one of its …
“Actually the educational software industry does know best about something, but about something other than the best ways to learn mathematics. It has excellent knowledge about what can be most easily sold to parents. Software that drills the kids in using numbers is easily recognized by the most uninformed parent as “math.” That kind of …
“Frankly, I think that it is downright immoral to trick children into learning and doing math when they think they are just playing an innocent game. To make the situation worse (as if anything can be worse than lying to children), the deception does not achieve any purpose, since cooperative learners who know what they …
“90 per cent of what we teach in school math is irrelevant today. A lot of it is about how numbers are written. It’s the influence of a paper based learning. Yeah you think of all that stuff you spent hours and hours, you write the numbers…. It’s about how you write numbers, it’s not …
“While it’s true that most people in math class don’t learn much math, most kids in French class don’t learn much French. But, we don’t say that they are not “French-ly minded.” We don’t say that they don’t have a head for French because we know that if they grew-up in France, they would learn …