Seymour Papert Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

My ex-student, Idit Harel, who wrote a book, "Children Designs," has a documented story of a kid who was very shy, isolated and didn't talk much to other kids. She was a little overweight, and the other kids looked down on her for that reason.But then she made a discovery about how to do something on the computer. The discovery was picked up by other kids, and within a few weeks there was a total transformation. This kid was now in demand. And that changed her feeling about herself.

Until very recently, most knowledge was inaccessible to people who couldn't read text. But this is changing. The computer opens up other channels of gaining knowledge. If someone is blind, we now have very good machines that will read to him. If someone can't recognize letters, he also will have access to knowledge through sound and images.

You can sit down with your child and prompt him to show you something - perhaps how to play a game [on the computer]. By learning a game, you're getting close to the kid and gaining insight into ways of learning. The kid can see this happening and feels respected, so it fosters the relationship between you and the kid.