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.
I imagine a school system that recognizes learning is natural, that a love of learning is normal, and that real learning is passionate learning. A school curriculum that values questions above answers...creativity above fact regurgitation...individuality above conformity.. and excellence above standardized performance..... And we must reject all notions of 'reform' that serve up more of the same: more testing, more 'standards', more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.
The court generally moves in small steps rather than in one giant step.
I tell young people to prepare themselves as best they can for a world that grows more challenging every day-get the best education they can, and couple that education with real-life experience in social justice work.
At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teachβit is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.