Seymour Papert: We imagine a school in which students and teachers exc...

The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.

Seymour Papert

education teacher school

You can't teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it.

Seymour Papert

learning education teacher

Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed in a classroom where nothing else is changed.

Seymour Papert

absurd classroom computer

Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum don't seem to understand. You'll never see a video game being advertised as being easy. Kids who do not like school will tell you it's not because it's too hard. It's because it's--boring

Seymour Papert

games kids school

I am convinced that the best learning takes place when the learner takes charge.

Seymour Papert

learners convinced

The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.

Seymour Papert

benefits teaching discovery

One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer, and in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intense contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.

Seymour Papert

powerful children art

The goal is to teach in such a way as to produce the most learning from the least teaching.

Seymour Papert

goal teaching way

My basic idea is that programming is the most powerful medium of developing the sophisticated and rigorous thinking needed for mathematics, for grammar, for physics, for statistics, for all the "hard" subjects.... In short, I believe more than ever that programming should be a key part of the intellectual development of people growing up.

Seymour Papert

growing-up powerful believe

The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education underlying this project. From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product.

Seymour Papert

views meaningful ideas

Rather than pushing children to think like adults, we might do better to remember that they are great learners and to try harder to be more like them.

Seymour Papert

trying children thinking

You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.

Seymour Papert

thinking

Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization...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.

Seymour Papert

teaching jobs children

The reason most kids don't like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it is utterly boring.

Seymour Papert

boring kids school

Do away with curriculum. Do away with segregation by age. And do away with the idea that there should be uniformity of all schools and of what people learn.

Seymour Papert

people ideas school

Now more people are doing work that requires individual decision-making and problem-solving, and we need an educational system that will help develop those skills.

Seymour Papert

educational skills people

It's not what you know about the computer that's important, but your ability to do things with it. By studying French in an academic setting, you get to know a lot about it, but typically, you can't express yourself well or have an interesting conversation with it.

Seymour Papert

interesting-conversation study important

We often treat children as if they're not very competent to do anything on their own. So we make them stop learning in a natural way - by exploring. Logo [the computer programming language ] allows them to find their way around the computer, as they would find their way around the house, uncontaminated by the bureaucracies of schools.

Seymour Papert

house children school

I prefer software where kids build something and run into problems they have to solve.

Seymour Papert

problem running kids

Working with the computer gives rise to many opportunities to transcend asocial behavior, because it produces exciting and visually interesting things to share, whether it's by creating video games, computer art or sharing exciting Web sites.

Seymour Papert

games opportunity art

We imagine a school in which students and teachers excitedly and joyfully stretch themselves to their limits in pursuit of projects built on their own visions … not one that that merely succeeds in making apathetic students satisfy minimal standards.