April 9, 2012
“You can lead a kid to Euclid, but you can’t make him think.” Papert, S. (1996) The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap. Atlanta: Longstreet Press. Page 187.
Seymour Papert. DailyPapert.com
February 28, 2012
“Geraldine Doogue: What I’m curious about then is out of this fascinating time working with Jean Piaget – who developed that whole notion of the stages of development for children – how would digital technology fit in to what you learned then? Because you’re a great advocate for digital technology being used to help children …
June 30, 2011
“So, I think the first impact of paper on education is that we’ve created a form of school and of learning that means that people with certain kinds of personalities, certain structures, neurological structures, take to it well and succeed, and some of them take to it less well and don’t succeed, and some of …
March 23, 2011
“Precisely these criticisms have often been made by humanists. If they have failed to put schools right what can a “technologist” do? This: take away the cause of the problem. The anti-social nature of school undoubtedly has roots in the class structure of society and in the nature of the Freudian unconscious. As long as …
March 22, 2011
“I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities. I think that the examples I have given of learning in a computational environment provide a glimpse of a context for learning in which socialization …
March 17, 2011
“The girl who said to her teacher “I want to do that” and the first grader who said to the third grader “show me how to do that” are just two out of hundreds of documented examples of children refusing the “infantalization” inherent in most contemporary schooling. These children refused to do what children are …
March 16, 2011
“I am talking about a revolution in ideas that is no more reducible to technologies than physics and molecular biology are reducible to the technological tools used in the laboratories or poetry to the printing press. In my vision, technology has two roles. One is heuristic: The computer presence has catalyzed the emergence of ideas. …
March 15, 2011
“For the reformists, the computer will not abolish schools but will serve them. The computer is seen as an engine that can be harnessed to existing structures in order to solve, in local and incremental measures, the problems that face schools as they exist today. The reformist is no more inclined than the revolutionary to …
March 14, 2011
“If you need to know whether drug X reduces blood-pressure, you may fairly safely draw a negative conclusion from a “treatment model” experiment in which hospitalized patients were given X and no change in blood-pressure was observed. On the other hand, you would not deduce that drug Y does not increase fertility from the simple …
March 9, 2011
“But there is a world of difference between what computers can do and what society will choose to do with them”. Papert, S. (1981) Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. NY: Basic Books. Page 5. Quote contributed by Dr. Eleonora Badilla Saxe of the University of Costa Rica.