#3quotes from Papert

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MIT professor Seymour Papert wanted to turn education on its head.

He was disillusioned with the idea that we should 'instruct' children and that they would learn solely from content delivery. He was particularly critical of the use of computers as 'replacements' for teachers. There's a clear indication of those sentiments in this quote from his seminal work from 1980, Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas:

“In many schools today, the phrase 'computer-aided instruction' means making the computer teach the child. 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 intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.” (Papert, 1980, p. 5)

He saw the learner as an active and engaged agent who could make things happen. Papert's ideas were brought together in a new model of learning which is now known as social constructionism. It is not simply about learning through making and doing, but also has other elements of problem solving, computational thinking, situated learning and negotiation of new meaning through the use of tools and technologies. Papert saw very little evidence of these elements in formalised education:

“Schooling is not a natural act. Quite the contrary: the institution of school, with its daily lesson plans, fixed curriculum, standardized tests, and other such paraphernalia tends to constantly reduce learning to a series of technical acts and the teacher to the role of a technician.” (Papert, 1993, p. 55)

Papert went on to discuss the tensions teachers often endure between their school-imposed roles as 'technicians' and their natural instincts to enter into 'warm human relationships.' One school Papers worked with introduced computers not as instructional tools, but as tools to encourage children to think and do for themselves. Much of what children learn while using computers was unplanned, and often deeper than what could be anticipated. In 1982 he related the story of one kindergarten child:

“.... children were given access to a set of games using the computer. They loved playing games. But once more the most important events were not what was intended but what the children decided for themselves. After a few weeks a member of the nursery class called over a teacher to set up a new game. The teacher did this by typing at the computer's keyboard. The child said "I want to do that". Another teacher might have said "Next year." But, instead she said "Sure. I will write on this piece of cardboard all the stuff I type… if you want to type it go ahead." The little girl did very much want to type it. It was grueling work. At a typing speed of several minutes a word she kept at it for many weeks. Slowly, the speed went up. Slowly she learned to type without copying. She was building up a vocabulary of spelled words.” (Papert, 1982, p 32).

References
Papert, S. (1980) Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas. Brighton: Harvester Press.

Papert, S. (1993) The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. New York: Perseus Books.

Papert, S. (1982) Tomorrow's Classrooms. Times Educational Supplement March 5, 1982 (pp. 31-32, 41)

Previous posts in the #3quotes series
Paulo Freire
Ivan Illich
John Dewey
Lev Vygotsky
Maria Montessori
Carl Rogers
John Holt
Jerome Bruner

#3quotes from Papert by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's