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.
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
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.
The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.
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.
You can’t think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We should think about what we mean by literacy. If you say, “He’s a very literate person,” what you really mean is that he knows a lot, thinks a lot, has a certain frame of mind that comes through reading and knowing about various subjects.The major route open to literacy has been through reading and writing text. But we’re seeing new media offer richer ways to explore knowledge and communicate, through sound and pictures.
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.
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.
The reason most kids don’t like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it is utterly boring.
For what is important when we give children a theorem to use is not that they should memorize it. What matters most is that by growing up with a few very powerful theorems one comes to appreciate how certain ideas can be used as tools to think with over a lifetime. One learns to enjoy and to respect the power of powerful ideas. One learns that the most powerful idea of all is the idea of powerful ideas.
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.
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.
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.
What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate
I was really looking at computers as a way to understand the mind. But at M.I.T., my mind was blown by having a whole computer to yourself as long as you liked.I felt a surge of intellectual power through access to this computer, and I started thinking about what this could mean for kids and the way they learn. That’s when we developed the computer programming language for kids, Logo.
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