K Bechtel

I have finished the book by Papert, and I am glad to be finished with it.  Although he made some great points throughout the book, I felt like he was totally bashing school without offering any real solution.  Yes, he provided excellent examples of learning opportunties from his own personal experiences to those of real students, but I just don’t think these are examples of the ultimate learning process.  I think learning really is a personal issue in that each student brings with them unique talents and interests and preferred ways of learning.  That’s one reason why teaching a classroom of kids is so hard.  We ( I mean teachers) classify every lesson as one size fits all, and obviously that is absurd.  I do believe many of the things that are done in the classroom are motivated by state and national guidelines and assessment data.  Papert was right when he said that much of what we learn is not on the state assessment. 

One of the most important points Papert made in the whole book in my opinion was on p. 123 when he said, ” Knowing that one can exercise choice in shaping and reshaping one’s intellectual identity may be the most empowering idea one can ever achieve.”  This is something not understood by my students nor their parents.  In a recent blog by Clarence Fisher, he talks about how important it is to give students the opportunity to be in charge or at least part of the what students learn and how they learn it.  He says, They (students) must become evaluators and creators of information; active and critical consumers and collectors, but the fact is that they need the opportunities to do these things and in classrooms, they aren’t often given. I think this is one route to the mega-change Papert speaks about.