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 truth of Scripture is meant not only to be studied-it’s meant also to be sung.
Young children possess the ability to cut across the customary categories; to appreciate usually undiscerned links among realms, to respond effectively in a parallel manner to events which are usually categorized differently, and to capture these ori
Libraries are not just places where people go read a book, but places where an immigrant goes to take English lessons and where folks out of a job search for community.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.
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