“If I think in terms of my three books on this subject, when Mindstorms was written there were barely any computers in schools. Throughout the 1980s many schools got in the act, acquiring computers. The most important phenomenon I understood at that time was the power of school, as an institution, to assimilate anything new […]
“I believe that school is an unnatural way for learning. I believe that natural learning is what happens before school and after school. But there are many things that can’t be learned in the environment of the home. School became necessary because some things are not imbedded in the culture of our daily lives so
“Imagine a society in which there were schools, but writing had not yet been invented, so there are no books and there are no pencils. People teach verbally and they learn by listening. It’s possible. One day somebody invents writing, and they invent the pencil. Somebody says, “Wow, this would be great for education, it
“It is impossible to predict what the school of the future will be. History always outsmarts the futurists. But it is easy to predict what it will NOT look like. I am sure that the practice of segregating children by age into “grades” will be seen as an old-fashioned, and inhumane, method of the “assembly
“Logo gave many thousands of elementary teachers their first opportunity to appropriate the computer in ways that would extend their personal styles of teaching. This was not easy for them. They were frustrated by poor conditions: They usually had to work with minimal computer systems and often had to share them among several classrooms; opportunities
“The introduction of computers is not the first challenge to education values. For example, John Dewey began his campaign for a more active and self-directed style of learning in schools over a hundred years ago, and in these intervening years numerous more or less radical reformers have strived to change School. Back then Dewey undertook
“We better recognize that laptop is just a little step in the progress towards the shift from the medium of paper, the primacy of paper-based static media to the primacy of electronic digital media, that’s going to come, it’s going to sweep the world, it’s going to change what we think we can know, how
“The best teacher is someone who brings personal knowledge, warmth and empathy to a relationship with a learner. The effect of the new technologies is to provide better conditions for such teachers to work directly with their students. Of course tele-teaching has a role, but I hope it will never be the primary form.” Papert,
“I end by mentioning two less specific “firsts” with which “Teaching Children Thinking” should be credited. At that time the concept of computers in education was synonymous with CAI (computer assisted instruction). I believe that “Teaching Children Thinking” was the first published paper to suggest that the child could be in charge of the machine
“It is obvious that schools are lagging behind deep changes in our society. They are still organized on the model of production line factories. The deepest reason for the lag is neither the lack of physical technology nor the ability of educators to understand its meaning. The biggest reason is the built-in self-preservationist conservatism of