(1998-05-22) Papert Technology Realizes Progressive Education

Seymour Papert on how Educational Technology makes Progressive Education ideals actualizable. *

• in a summer workshop, children aged seven to 14 are building with extended Lego sets including motors, sensors (gadgets sensitive to light, touch and heat) and, most interestingly, a special computer small enough to be placed inside the model... These children are engaged in something that traditional school seldom offers: serious projects that involve working on hard technical problems for many hours a day, every day for several weeks. In the course of doing so, they come into contact with a wide range of technical, scientific and mathematical knowledge, some of which may be in the usual school curriculum, some not. All come out at the end having learnt a great deal more about these subjects than anyone learns in a much longer time in a classroom. In addition, they have had some tough experience learning what it is like to manage a complex project. (PBL)
• The scenario fits the ideal of learning that has been advocated for more than a century by proponents of "open", "progressive", "child-centred" education. But the scenario is radically different in several ways from the forms of progressive education that have been tested in schools and often found wanting. Indeed, I would argue that anything that could be implemented in a school context without extensive use of digital technologies could not be fully true to the progressive ideal that children should be able to acquire knowledge by using it in activities in which they have a personal interest. (Constructivism)
• The contribution of the technology to learning environments like my scenario workshop is inextricably tangled with social aspects. The mixture of ages is in sharp contrast to the age segregation typically practised in schools... the presence in one Learning Community of people of different ages and different prior experience contributes to the chance that someone there will be able to help when a problem comes up. Of course, mutual help is possible without digital technology. But it is made far easier by many factors
• From this follows a political aspect of child power as a factor in the interplay of change and resistance to change in education (Education Reform). For if the computer industry, the education establishment and the politicians have a common vested interest in keeping school as it is (Status Quo), children do not. And if just 10 per cent of children (Constituency For Change) came to school with the experience of far richer learning outside, and with the expertise to show the school how to do it better, the pressure for change would quickly become irresistible.