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.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes schools for failing to foster independence and critical thinking in children.
Seymour Papert's quote highlights the frustration with a conventional education system that, while claiming to teach socialization, often stifles children's intellectual growth and autonomy. He argues that schools contribute to a culture of dependency and passivity rather than empowering students to think critically and develop their abilities effectively.
In practice
In a debate about educational reform, one could use this quote to highlight the shortcomings of traditional schooling.
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.
The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.
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.
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
A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.
How many times... have you encountered the saying, 'When the student is ready, the Master speaks?' Do you know why that is true? The door opens inward. The Master is everywhere, but the student has to open his mind to hear the Masters Voice.
I'm very passionate about political issues, but I also think that listening to people who disagree is extremely important, and I try to build that into my teaching, sometimes by co-teaching with rightwing colleagues.
I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.
Whether I'm at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I'm looking forward to reading.
If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them - all of these further a child's brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months.
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