“Imagine a party of time travelers, among them a group of surgeons and a group of school teachers, who came from the last century to see how things are done in our days. Think of the bewilderment of the surgeons when they find themselves in the operating room of a modem hospital! The nineteenth-century surgeons […]
“Although printed in 1970, “Teaching Children Thinking” was conceived in 1968 and bears the signs of the heady atmosphere of that time. Across the society change was in the air, deeply rooted assumptions were being challenged. On a smaller and less active but not less radical scale challenges to taken-for-granted ideas about children, about education
“The failure of past reformers to bring about dramatically better learning has armed those within the educational establishment with the argument that future proposals will prove no more capable of bringing about radically improved learning. Some may well believe that the best argument against megachange is this: If it has so long been so desperately
“I’d like to make a very clear distinction between how you think as a revolutionary, not someone who wishes to force change, but someone who looks far enough ahead and sees that there is going to be change. There is going to be fundamental change. And the big question that I would like to raise
“Those other people, they don’t have conferences about “paper in education.” They have conferences on education, because they think they’re talking about the real thing. By having a conference on computers in education, we are defining ourselves in a subordinate position.” Papert, S. (2004) Keynote address at the i3 1 to 1 Notebook Conference. Sydney,
“Some sectors of human activity such as medicine, transportation and communications were transformed beyond recognition during the twentieth century. Compared with such megachange the practices of school have been virtually static. There are in principle two diametrically opposed visions of the role of new technologies in education. In one vision the technology is a means