The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.
Interpretation
Over-teaching can rob students of the joy and rewards of learning through their own discoveries.
Seymour Papert's quote highlights a significant issue in the educational system: the tendency to provide information in a way that limits students' opportunities to explore and discover knowledge independently. The process of discovery, where students make their own connections and learn through experience, is crucial for deeper understanding and enjoyment of learning. By overly directing the learning process, educators may unintentionally diminish the intrinsic motivation and satisfaction that come from self-guided exploration.
In practice
This quote can be used in a teacher training seminar to encourage educators to rethink their approach to teaching.
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.
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.
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.
Don't let schooling interfere with your education.
I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.
The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things-the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.
People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
Schools teach you how to work for money, but don't teach how to make money work for you
The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science.
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