Seymour Papert
Seymour Papert
Seymour Aubrey Papertis an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, and co-inventor, with Wally Feurzeig, of the Logo programming language...
retirement thinking ideas
I do think that we'd do better if we just offered all the bureaucrats in the Department of Education very attractive early retirements. But whether you want to abolish the department is another matter. Maybe there's room for recruiting a lot of visionary people who would do very good things: develop new techniques, new ideas, foster innovative models, disseminate those ideas.
computer-literacy people machines
Similarly, computer literacy courses tend to produce computer people who know a lot about computers or a piece of software but they don't help people become fluent with the machine.
teacher children experts
I tell adults about the experiences of more than a hundred teachers I've interviewed. They tell me that allowing the child to help them learn helped them become better teachers. That's because they no longer had to pretend they were the experts - not only about computers but about other things.
essence gears machines
What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate
educational skills people
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.
children school house
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.
jobs children teaching
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.
children teaching opportunity
If children really want to learn something, and have the opportunity to learn it in use, they do so even if the teaching is poor. For example many learn difficult video games with no professional teaching at all!
kids independent thinking
This frenzy about cyberporn indicates some deeper fear of adults as they see kids become more independent and learn things they never learned. I think those fears also reflect a failure to communicate. Parents should be able to say to their kids: "There is stuff out there that we don't look at, and if you find yourself looking at it or someone approaching you about it, then let's talk about it."
daddy ask-me asks
Daddy always asks me and I never know what to say”.
kids knowing-everything parent
Parents can learn that parental authority doesn't depend on knowing everything. The more you pretend, the more risk that it'll be traumatic and damaging to the kids and their relationship with you when they find out the truth.
kids reality mtv
I don't like MTV, and I don't like the culture that goes with it. It's OK in very small doses, maybe. Nevertheless, it's a social reality and has influenced how kids perceive things around them, the pace of life and the way people do things.
powerful mean thinking
I think Disney is a very interesting company, and it does have an extremely powerful means for projecting a certain way of thinking.
children thinking abuse
The first thing to note is that pornography and many abductions occur apart from the use of computers, and that most child abuse happens within the family. So I think the extra degree of danger that computers pose doesn't justify the frenzy.