The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer
by Seymour Papert
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Seymour Papert is the father of Constructionism which is the foundation of my Instructional Vision. Papert believed that children learned best by constructing knowledge and then concretizing (did I just make up a new word?) that knowledge by creating a tangible product that shares what they have learned with an audience.
The Children's Machine was written in 1993. Immediately, I was struck by the relevance of the Preface: "Today, in industrial countries, most people are doing jobs that did not exist when they were born. The most important skill determining a person's life pattern has already become the ability to learn new skills, to take in new concepts, to assess new situations, to deal with the unexpected. This will be increasingly true in the future: The competitive ability is the ability to learn." |
This is still the case today. Read any modern article about prized skills in the workforce of 2017 and the future, and you will read about things like curiosity, problem-solving, creativity, and lifelong learner. This book attempts to look for an answer to the question that was plaguing education at the time, and is something that is plaguing education today: "Why, through a period when so much of human activity has been revolutionized, have we not seen comparable change in the way we help our children learn?"
I hear you. We have SMARTBoards and laptops now to help children learn! But when these devices are being used in a way that is no different than a textbook, notebook, and pencil, how is learning in the tech-laden classroom different? Don't get me wrong, we have some pockets of innovation happening in some classrooms, in some school buildings, in some districts. I feel like I can comfortably say that there is a growing group of people trying to push for changing school to more modern learning environments. I am part of this group of educators. It's going to take more than technology to change learning. We need to rethink what school is supposed to be. We need to rethink what learning looks like in our modern contexts.
Papert was a seer of our future...
There are powerful stories of learning by doing throughout the book that captured my thoughts. I saw the importance of percolation of ideas, a mathematical mindset, and metacognition. I read an amazing description of what we now call Project-Based Learning - "One of my preferred styles of working with such a group is to propose a form of a project sufficiently open to allow very different approaches and sufficiently restricted to allow the different approaches to be compared."
And then there was my moment with Mathetics. A moment of reading that had me dumbfounded on a subway ride. I had to write about the experience that day in my Blog, unwilling to wait for me to write this book review on site. Papert expertly connects Dirty Dancing and learning, folks. Seriously. As educators and learners, we stand on the shoulders of giants. We need to embrace their messages and learn from them, read about them, and share their knowledge with others.
I hear you. We have SMARTBoards and laptops now to help children learn! But when these devices are being used in a way that is no different than a textbook, notebook, and pencil, how is learning in the tech-laden classroom different? Don't get me wrong, we have some pockets of innovation happening in some classrooms, in some school buildings, in some districts. I feel like I can comfortably say that there is a growing group of people trying to push for changing school to more modern learning environments. I am part of this group of educators. It's going to take more than technology to change learning. We need to rethink what school is supposed to be. We need to rethink what learning looks like in our modern contexts.
Papert was a seer of our future...
- He describes a "Knowledge Machine" that children use to access information on demand. "Such a system would allow [children] of the future to explore a world significantly richer than what I was offered by my printed books. Using speech, touch, or gestures, she would steer the machine to the topic of interest, quickly navigating through a knowledge space much broader than the contents of any printed encyclopedia."
- He also talks about how children will not be happy having to sit through traditional curriculum and teaching when the world is at their fingertips. "Children who grow up with the opportunity to explore the jungles and the cities and the deep oceans and the ancient myths and outer space will be even less likely than the players of video games to sit quietly through anything even vaguely resembling the elementary-school curriculum as we have known it up to now!"
There are powerful stories of learning by doing throughout the book that captured my thoughts. I saw the importance of percolation of ideas, a mathematical mindset, and metacognition. I read an amazing description of what we now call Project-Based Learning - "One of my preferred styles of working with such a group is to propose a form of a project sufficiently open to allow very different approaches and sufficiently restricted to allow the different approaches to be compared."
And then there was my moment with Mathetics. A moment of reading that had me dumbfounded on a subway ride. I had to write about the experience that day in my Blog, unwilling to wait for me to write this book review on site. Papert expertly connects Dirty Dancing and learning, folks. Seriously. As educators and learners, we stand on the shoulders of giants. We need to embrace their messages and learn from them, read about them, and share their knowledge with others.