afraid of the dilution of rigor by the encroachment of wishy washy humanistic thinking
And other quotes from Seymour Papert!!
<3 <3 <3
Imagine that children were forced to spend an hour a day drawing dance steps on squared paper and had to pass tests in these "dance facts" before they were allowed to dance physically. Would we not expect the world to be full of "danceophobes"? Would we say that those who made it to the dance floor and music had the greatest "aptitude for dance"? In my view, it is no more appropriate to draw conclusions about mathematical aptitude from children's unwillingness to spend many hundreds of hours doing sums.
.. mathematics would become a natural vocabulary..
...preadult theorizations of the world...
... deficiency becomes identity ...
.. our children grow up in a culture permeated with the idea that there are "smart people" and "dumb people". The social construction of the individual is as a bundle of aptitudes.
Everything is set up for children to attribute their first unsuccessful or unpleasant learning experience to their own disabilities.
... will be learned as the child learns to talk, painlessly, successfully, and without organized instruction ...
... do it in a carefree spirit without explicit external rewards and punishments..
.. our culture's schizophrenic split between "humanities" and "science"...
... become passive observers of their own incompetence ...
Increasingly, the computers ... will gradually return to the individual the power to determine patterns of education. Education will become more of a private act, and people with good ideas, different ideas, exciting ideas will no longer be faced with a dilemma where they either have to "sell" their ideas to a conservative bureaucracy or shelve them. They will be able to offer them in an open marketplace directly to consumers. There will be new opportunities for imagination and originality. There might be a renaissance of thinking about education.
// written in the early 1980s!!