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.
For thousands and thousands of American kids, libraries are the only safe place they can find to study, a haven free from the dangers of street or the numbing temptations of television. As schools cut back services, the library looms even more important to countless children.
The progress of the world depends almost entirely upon education.
Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for... are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.
The competitions between fiction and nonfiction, short and long, electronic and paper, are not battles in which there can be only one victor. After all, we exist in a world where more kinds of writing than ever are greeted with interest and enthusiasm.
The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read With loads of learned lumber in his head.
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