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Untitled
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Ghost in the Machine
Seymour Papert on how computers fundamentally change the way kids learn
by Dan Schwartz
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 Long before the World Wide Web or even PCs, Seymour Papert was proclaiming the educational value of computers. While today parents and politicians alike demand computers for their children's classrooms, in the 1960s, Papert was derided as an elitist for advocating an educational tool to which only children of the very richest families would have access.
Papert is the co-founder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence and Media Labs, professor of Media Technology at MIT, and one of the world's foremost experts on the impact of computers on learning. He is the current elderstatesman in a lineage of educational reformers that include John Dewey and Jean Piaget. His constructionist theories are manifested in Logo, a programming language he developed for children. His 1980 book Mindstorms sent shockwaves throughout the education and psychology communities, both of which accused him of pushing an educational pill that would induce psychosis in our children.
Almost twenty years later no one is exactly clamoring for surgeon general warning labels on PCs. Indeed, anyone who has witnessed a toddler using a computer has probably experienced a sense of awe at that child's facility with what for adults can be an infinitely frustrating gadget. It's one thing for a child to play a computer game; it's another thing altogether for a child to build his or her own game. And this, according to Papert, is where the computer's true power as an educational medium lies -- in the ability to facilitate and extend children's awesome natural ability and drive to construct, hypothesize, explore, experiment, evaluate, draw conclusions -- in short to learn -- all by themselves. It is this very drive, Papert contends, that is squelched by our current educational system.
Papert knows the bureaucracy he is crusading against is firmly entrenched. But he takes comfort in a secret weapon unavailable to a long line of education reformers up until now. He calls it "kid power." Papert's is a trickle-up vision of change demanded by a generation that learned to use a mouse about the same time it learned to use a spoon. And for the parents of this digitally-weaned generation, Papert offers some ideas about how to bridge a gap that, for many, starts not during adolescence, but in pre-school.
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Meet Seymour Papert.
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Seymour Papert
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