Papert, Seymour

1928–

Mathematician and Computer Scientist

Seymour Papert is best known for his contributions to our understanding of children's learning processes, and to the ways in which technology can support learning. He invented the Logo computer language, a valuable educational tool used by children and their teachers throughout the world. He is also one of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and an acclaimed mathematician.

Papert was born and educated in South Africa, where he participated in the anti-apartheid movement. He did mathematical research at Cambridge University from 1954 to 1958, then worked with the well-known psychologist Jean Piaget at the University of Geneva until 1963. Famous for his work on the cognitive development of young children, Piaget was an extremely influential figure in Papert's thinking about children and learning. In the early 1960s, Papert became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There he co-authored the seminal work Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry (1970) with Marvin Minsky, and worked with Minsky on the theory of the Society of Mind (which Minsky continued to explore while Papert turned his attention to education). At MIT, Papert also helped found the Media Lab, and co-founded the Artificial Intelligence Lab. Papert currently lives in Maine, where he has founded a small laboratory for learning research called the Learning Barn.

Although Papert is highly regarded and influential in the fields of AI research and mathematics, his best-known work concerns children's learning styles and technology. Papert is highly critical of traditional educational thought, in which children are cast in the role of passive recipients of knowledge, rather than active participants in activity-based, creative, non-structured learning exchanges.

Papert refers to his educational philosophy as constructionism, in that it focuses on the idea of mental construction. In his 1993 book, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, he explains: “The principal other necessary change parallels an African proverb: If a man is hungry you can give him a fish, but it is better to give him a line and teach him to catch fish himself. Traditional education codifies what it thinks citizens need to know and sets out to feed children this ‘fish.’ [Page 365]Constructionism is built on the assumption that children will do best by finding (‘fishing’) for themselves the specific knowledge they need.”

Papert is highly critical of schools for their hierarchical organization, dependence on testing and learning by rote, commitment to uniformity, and valuing of information over knowledge. Children learn best, he believes, through tinkering (“bricolage”), unstructured activities that resemble play, and research based on partial knowledge—by solving problems that are interesting to them, much as they do in non-school situations. An example would be learning about measurement while baking a cake, as opposed to passively observing abstract lessons about cups and gallons. Rather than attempt to change the schooling system incrementally by including technology in the curriculum, he calls for a fundamental shift in our epistemology of learning—how we understand the goals of education and the ways in which children learn best.

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