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

Seymour Papert

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Seymour Papert
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: February 29
Died: 2016
Died: July 31
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Computer Scientist
Educator
Mathematician
Psychologist
University Teacher
Pretoria
South Africa
Seymour Aubrey Papert
Seymour A. Papert
Gears
Machines
Essence
Computer
Cannot
Power
Might
Simulate
Universality

More quotes by Seymour Papert

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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.
Seymour Papert
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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.
Seymour Papert
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Daddy always asks me and I never know what to say”.
Seymour Papert
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If children really want to learn something, and have the opportunity to learn it in use, they do so even if the teaching is poor. For example many learn difficult video games with no professional teaching at all!
Seymour Papert
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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.
Seymour Papert
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BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.
Seymour Papert
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I tell adults about the experiences of more than a hundred teachers I've interviewed. They tell me that allowing the child to help them learn helped them become better teachers. That's because they no longer had to pretend they were the experts - not only about computers but about other things.
Seymour Papert
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The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.
Seymour Papert
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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.
Seymour Papert
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I don't like MTV, and I don't like the culture that goes with it. It's OK in very small doses, maybe. Nevertheless, it's a social reality and has influenced how kids perceive things around them, the pace of life and the way people do things.
Seymour Papert
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I think we should allow for schools within schools, where 100 out of 500 kids may be organized by the way they work and what they do, and what they do often is more progressive. I would like to see a lot of kids of different ages, maybe even some adults, work together on a project.
Seymour Papert
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The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.
Seymour Papert
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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.
Seymour Papert
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Working with the computer gives rise to many opportunities to transcend asocial behavior, because it produces exciting and visually interesting things to share, whether it's by creating video games, computer art or sharing exciting Web sites.
Seymour Papert
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The reason most kids don't like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it is utterly boring.
Seymour Papert
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You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.
Seymour Papert
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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.
Seymour Papert
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I prefer software where kids build something and run into problems they have to solve.
Seymour Papert
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It's not what you know about the computer that's important, but your ability to do things with it. By studying French in an academic setting, you get to know a lot about it, but typically, you can't express yourself well or have an interesting conversation with it.
Seymour Papert
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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.
Seymour Papert