Seymour Papert Quotes

#1. Our goal in education should be to foster the ability to use the computer in everything you do, even if you don't have a specific piece of software for the job.

Seymour Papert

#2. Corporate America needs to get its act together to see that the education system is changed so it produces what it needs. The educational system that teaches kids to be passive recipients of knowledge worked when most workers were sitting in assembly lines.

Seymour Papert

#3. If a kid really is retarded and can only come up to a certain level, he will still have more success if what he learns is connected with something important to him.

Seymour Papert

#4. 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

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

Seymour Papert

#6. 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

#7. I think we should allow for schools within schools, where 100 out of 500 kids may be organized by the way they work and what they do, and what they do often is more progressive. I would like to see a lot of kids of different ages, maybe even some adults, work together on a project.

Seymour Papert

#8. Often kids in a computer lab learn about word-processing, but if they want to write an essay, they write it by hand. This is exactly the opposite of what you want them to learn. They're approaching the computer as just another abstract school subject.

Seymour Papert

#9. 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

#10. A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.

Seymour Papert

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

Seymour Papert

#12. 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

#13. 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.

Seymour Papert

#14. 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.

Seymour Papert

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

Seymour Papert

#16. BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.

Seymour Papert

#17. In a classical joke a child stays behind after school to ask a personal question. "Teacher, what did I learn today? " The surprised teacher asks, "Why do you ask that?" and the child replies, "Daddy always asks me and I never know what to say".

Seymour Papert

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

Seymour Papert

#19. 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

#20. Adults have been brainwashed into thinking that they can't really learn about computers without being taught, so it's more difficult for them to feel comfortable with a computer. Deep down, I think they're afraid of learning about computers.

Seymour Papert

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

Seymour Papert

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

Seymour Papert

#23. Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But school learning more often fits Freire's apt metaphor: knowledge is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future.

Seymour Papert

#24. 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.

Seymour Papert

#25. I think Disney is a very interesting company, and it does have an extremely powerful means for projecting a certain way of thinking.

Seymour Papert

#26. The mathophobia endemic in contemporary culture blocks many people from learning anything they recognize as 'math,' although they may have no trouble with mathematical knowledge they do not perceive as such.

Seymour Papert

#27. 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!

Seymour Papert

#28. There's a tendency to make jazzy educational software that's very uniform and therefore just like school. I'd like to see a company develop software for rebellious kids who don't want to go to school.

Seymour Papert

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

Seymour Papert

#30. 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

#31. What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate

Seymour Papert

#32. 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.

Seymour Papert

#33. 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

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

Seymour Papert

#35. We imagine a school in which students and teachers excitedly and joyfully stretch themselves to their limits in pursuit of projects built on their vision ... not one that succeeds in making apathetic students satisfying minimal standards.

Seymour Papert

#36. 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.

Seymour Papert