78 Quotes by Seymour Papert

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I think there is good reason to believe that if everything were open, fewer bad things could happen. So give everyone the tools to observe and communicate what is happening.

Our interest is really in Third World development. I believe that it's essential to solving the problems of poverty, violence, and environment, to have better education.