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.
The young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.
The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.
This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture. But mainstream sources - schools, textbooks, media - don't provide us with the multiple perspectives we need.
Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.
I believe in women. I desire . . . to do those things that would advance women in moral and spiritual, as well as educational work.
I was too worried about the grades and I should have been more worried about learning.
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