Seymour Papert Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Seymour Papert

  Education, Teacher, School

  338 Copy quote

• 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

  Education, Teacher, Learning

  304 Copy quote

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

  Seymour Papert

  Learners, Convinced

  176 Copy quote

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

  Seymour Papert

  Teaching, Discovery, Benefits

  182 Copy quote

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

  Seymour Papert

  Teaching, Goal, Way

  144 Copy quote

• 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

  School, Kids, Games

  184 Copy quote

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

  Seymour Papert

  Computer, Classroom, Absurd

  173 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Children, Powerful

  "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas". Book by Seymour Papert, 1980.

  168 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Thinking, Trying

  134 Copy quote

• 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

  154 Copy quote

• 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

  Meaningful, Views, Ideas

  151 Copy quote

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

  Seymour Papert

  Thinking

  150 Copy quote

• 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.

  Seymour Papert

  Teacher, Teaching, School

  "Vision for Education: The Caperton-Papert Platform" by Seymour Papert and Gaston Caperton, www.papert.org. August 1999.

  124 Copy quote

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

  Seymour Papert

  School, Kids, Boring

  76 Copy quote

• 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

  "Sunday Interview - Seymour Papert/ Computers in the Lives of Our Children/ an Mit Mathematician and Philosopher Is Exploring How Technology Can Educate the Next Generation - and Their Parents". www.sfgate.com. February 2, 1997.

  64 Copy quote

• 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

  Jobs, Children, Teaching

  120 Copy quote

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

  Seymour Papert

  Running, Kids, Problem

  "Sunday Interview - Seymour Papert/ Computers in the Lives of Our Children/ an Mit Mathematician and Philosopher Is Exploring How Technology Can Educate the Next Generation - and Their Parents". www.sfgate.com. February 2, 1997.

  43 Copy quote

• 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

  School, Ideas, People

  "Sunday Interview - Seymour Papert/ Computers in the Lives of Our Children/ an Mit Mathematician and Philosopher Is Exploring How Technology Can Educate the Next Generation - and Their Parents". www.sfgate.com. February 2, 1997.

  81 Copy quote

• Undoubtedly, there are kids with intellectual deficiencies or neurological problems. But a lot of kids shunted into special education classes are deficient only in a willingness to conform to the school pattern.They are just honest, brave kids who say, "I just won't take that, and I don't believe in what you're doing." If you give them an alternative to the usual classroom, they break free of a lot of inhibitions and bad associations, and they begin to learn.

  Seymour Papert

  Believe, School, Kids

  "Sunday Interview - Seymour Papert/ Computers in the Lives of Our Children/ an Mit Mathematician and Philosopher Is Exploring How Technology Can Educate the Next Generation - and Their Parents". www.sfgate.com. February 2, 1997.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Educational, Kids, America

  Source: www.sfgate.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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, Important, Study

  "Sunday Interview - Seymour Papert/ Computers in the Lives of Our Children/ an Mit Mathematician and Philosopher Is Exploring How Technology Can Educate the Next Generation - and Their Parents". www.sfgate.com. February 2, 1997.

  73 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Teaching, Opportunity

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Teacher, Children, Adults

  Source: www.sfgate.com

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Essence, Gears, Machines

  27 Copy quote

• 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.

  Seymour Papert

  Children, Book, Kids

  "Sunday Interview - Seymour Papert/ Computers in the Lives of Our Children/ an Mit Mathematician and Philosopher Is Exploring How Technology Can Educate the Next Generation - and Their Parents". www.sfgate.com. February 2, 1997.

  16 Copy quote

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