Seymour Papert Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

Rather than pushing children to think like adults, we might do better to remember that they are great learners and to try harder to be more like them.

Do away with curriculum. Do away with segregation by age. And do away with the idea that there should be uniformity of all schools and of what people learn.

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.

I prefer software where kids build something and run into problems they have to solve.

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.

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

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

I think Disney is a very interesting company, and it does have an extremely powerful means for projecting a certain way of thinking.

Similarly, computer literacy courses tend to produce computer people who know a lot about computers or a piece of software but they don't help people become fluent with the machine.

BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.

Daddy always asks me and I never know what to say”.

If a kid really is retarded and can only come up to a certain level, he will still have more success if what he learns is connected with something important to him.