Seymour Papert

 Seymour Papert was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on March 1, 1928. His father was an etymologist who studied the African insect, the tsetse fly. During the early 1930's, young Seymour spent months each year in "various wild places on the southeast coast of Africa" with his parents, their white assistant, and several black workers and their families. It was in this "transparent little world" that Papert became interested in learning the mechanics of things. (Goldberg, 1991)

Mathematics, practical activism and philosophy merged in Papert's mind as he widened his experiences and studies. He chose mathematics as a course of study because he saw it as a politically neutral subject at a time when his college activism kept him in trouble in South Africa. In 1959, Jean Piaget invited Papert to work with him in Geneva. Piaget was studying how children begin to understand mathematics, and he was impressed with Papert's doctoral thesis on the understanding of topology as pure mathematics. Piaget felt that to uncover the learning process, one must really have to understand the deepest questions about the nature of mathematics. Piaget also felt that mathematicians and especially people interested in the philosophy of mathematics are more important to have around than psychologists. It was his work with Piaget that convinced Papert that it was more interesting to study what children can do than what they cannot do. (Papert, 1980)

In his book,The Children's Machine, Papert writes about the obstacles that school presents to changing instruction and promoting thinking and learning. There seems to be a frame of mind that perpetuates the idea of how school is supposed to be. He classifies educators as Schoolers or Yearners. Schoolers continue the path that school has been on, while Yearners strive to change education. Schoolers block educational reform because of their educational beliefs. (Benson, 1995) He opens his book with a parable that clearly states his point of view about change in schools:

"Imagine a party of time travelers from an earlier century, among them one group of surgeons and another of schoolteachers, each group eager to see how much things have changed in their profession a hundred or more years into the future. Imagine the bewilderment of the surgeons finding themselves in the operating room of a modern hospital. Although they would know that an operation of some sort was being performed, and might even be able to guess at the target organ, they would in almost all cases be unable to figure out many strange devices he and the surgical staff were employing. The rituals of antisepsis and anesthesia, the beeping electronics, and even the bright lights, all so familiar to television audiences, would be utterly unfamiliar to them.

The time-traveling teachers would respond very differently to a modern elementary school classroom. They might be puzzled by a few strange objects. They might notice that some standard techniques had changed - and would likely disagree among themselves about whether the changes they saw were for the better of the worse - but they would fully see the point of most of what was being attempted and could quite easily take over the class."

Papert states that even though education has changed, it has not changed in ways that have substantially altered its nature. He uses this parable to set up the question: Why, through a period when so much human activity has been revolutionized, have we not seen comparable change in the way we help our children learn? (Papert, 1993)

Papert believes the way to change education is not in concentrating on any particular technique but to change the entire culture in which education takes place. In 1965, walking on a hilltop in Cyprus, Papert realized - "it just sort of hit me like a thunderbolt" - that computers had great potential for making a difference in our culture. The best way to contribute to education would be to harness that cultural change to the lives of children, the growth of children. (Goldberg, 1991)

Papert went on to learn how to program and think about computers and learning at the National Physics Laboratory in England. He began to meet people from MIT, notably Warren McCulloch and Marvin Minsky. His association with them caused him to deepen his Piagetian belief that children are builders of their own intellectual structures. At the same time, he pondered the paradox Piaget had voiced: "children are marvelous at learning, and yet in school it seems so difficult to teach them." (Papert, 1980)

Through his association with Piaget, Papert had found a way of putting together these two poles of mathematics: philosophy of mind and a way that could have an activist facet that could lead to rethinking how children learn and change the nature of education. (Goldberg, 1991) Papert believes that children learn by following their own interests; by exploring. He feels they learn because they've got an instinct to learn and they follow it. He also believes that building things helps people to learn. (IBM, 1995)

In 1964, when he first arrived at MIT, he found there weren't any people involved in research on children, so he concentrated on theoretical models on intelligence and artificial intelligence; however, by 1967 he was hard at work on his mission to make it possible for children to master the computer. Describing the early drill-and-practice uses of computers and "the computer programming the child," he sought to create a computer microworld, not unlike the fascinating world of his father's research camp in Swaziland: a world that a child could master. (Goldberg, 1991)

Papert began thinking about designing a computer language that would be suitable for children. He wanted it to have the power of professional programming languages, but he also wanted it to have easy entry routes for nonmathematical beginners. The name LOGO was chosen for the new language to suggest the fact that it is primarily symbolic and only secondarily quantitative. ( Papert, 1980) LOGO involves the recognition and uses of colors, shapes, directions, letters, words, and sounds. It teaches concepts such as planning, problem solving, and experimentation, and it introduces children to computer use. In practice, LOGO involves the manipulation of "turtles," a form that can be moved around the computer screen, to draw or erase lines. (Grolier, 1993)

Through LOGO, Papert realized his dream of making children masterful users of computers and it provided them with many ways to solve problems, including some that had never occurred to him. Papert states that LOGO is deeply appealing to children because "many schools appear to kids as a look to the past. This is a piece of the space age that you can hold in your hand. It's a connection with what you see on the television set; it's a connection with the future." (Goldberg, 1991)

Papert also foresees a change in the meaning of literacy in the future. From his "Multimedia Today" interview, Papert states that with multimedia, the role of the written word may become much less important. In the future he suspects that we will be less likely to associate people who are educated with people who have the ability to read books; someone who hasn't read a single book might be an extremely well-informed and culturally rich person. He thinks we need to make a distinction between the connotation of literacy that has to do with cultural richness and the connotation of literacy that just has to do with print medium. To make his point, Papert introduced the word "letteracy" in his book,The Children's Machine. "Letteracy" refers to a very special knowledge about letters as distinct from the richer knowledge which is what we really care about. These two meanings are evident when people talk about computer literacy; by computer literacy they mean that you know a little bit about computers and yet if somebody knows just that little about books, you would say that they were illiterate. (Papert, 1993) Seymour Papert has coined the word "constructionism" as his theory of learning and education. Constructionism is based on two different senses of "construction" that includes the traditional constructivists meaning that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information "poured"into their heads. He also adds that "constructionism" asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts such as computer programs, animations or robots. (MIT Media Lab Projects, 1995)