Quotes from Seymour Papert

What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate

I am convinced that the best learning takes place when the learner takes charge.

The goal is to teach in such a way as to produce the most learning from the least teaching.

A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.

The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.

You can't teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it.

The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.

The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.

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

Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But school learning more often fits Freire 's apt metaphor: knowledge is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future.

In a classical joke a child stays behind after school to ask a personal question. "Teacher, what did I learn today? " The surprised teacher asks, "Why do you ask that?" and the child replies, "Daddy always asks me and I never know what to say".

Nothing bothers 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 know. 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.

In many schools today, the phrase "computer-aided instruction" means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.

The mathophobia endemic in contemporary culture blocks many people from learning anything they recognize as 'math,' although they may have no trouble with mathematical knowledge they do not perceive as such.

Progressive teachers knew very well how to use the computer for their own ends as an instrument of change; School knew very well how to nip this subversion in the bud.

But the interesting cases are those where the conflict remains obstinately in place however much we ponder the problem. These are the cases where we are tempted to conclude that "intuition cannot be trusted." In these situations we need to improve our intuition, to debug it, but the pressure on us is to abandon intuition and rely on equations instead.

You can't think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.

Children begin their lives as eager and competent learners. They have to learn to have trouble with learning in general and mathematics in particular.

The reason most kids don't like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it is utterly boring.

Now more people are doing work that requires individual decision-making and problem-solving, and we need an educational system that will help develop those skills.

Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed in a classroom where nothing else is changed.

Our goal in education should be to foster the ability to use the computer in everything you do, even if you don't have a specific piece of software for the job.