(720) "A key in understanding why School is what it is lies in recognizing a systematic tendency to deform ideas in specific ways in order to make them fit into a pedagogical framework." 

(720) "One can take two approaches to renovating School--or indeed anything else.  The problem-solving approach identifies the many problems that afflict individual schools and tries to solve them.  A systemic approach requires one to step back from the immediate problems and develop an understanding of how the whole thing works.  Educators faced with day-to-day operation of schools are forced by circumstances to rely on problem solving for local fixes.  They do not have time for "big ideas.""

 This is a pretty strong theme, and a great way of couching the difference between insider and outsider reform.

(720) "The most neglected big ideas is the very idea of bigness of ideas." 

 ! - epistemological, pedagogical, and all sorts of meta- discussion are missing when it comes to ideas.  The closest I've seen is the discussion of eleganc and aesthetics or self-consistency in physics and math.  But why?  The content of an idea is less important than the exercise it gives you.

(721) "exercising a particular idea" 

 I really like that metaphor: employing an idea = exercising it.  Its exercise is the fruit of problem solving, even if problems aren't solved perfectly.  Context provides motivation, but completion is not required for content.

(721) "Working with Michael has increased for me the troubling awareness that failure in school can be the expression of valuable intellectual and personal qualities." 

 From Papert, I don't take this as just a bromide.  (Imagine--that sort of concern or dissatisfaction can be seen as a bromide!)

(721) "What he really needed in the first place was work that is "harder" in the sense of having more intellectual substance and requiring more real concentration.  The form this work might take will differ from child to child: in Michael's case it should certainly be some form of "idea work."" 

 What are the other types?

(721) "working with [Michael] aso helped me to a new understanding of a specific feature of the School mind-set which I now recognize (shocking as this may seem to many readers) as a bias against ideas in favor of skills and facts--an idea aversion."

 Man, that's stark.  And thematic.

(721) "It is close to 40 years since I fell in love with the idea that a technologically rich environment could give to children who love ideas access to learning-rich idea work, and to those who love ideas less the opportunity to love them more." 

 Compare this to the sleight-of-hand involved in getting them to love something more!

(722) As an epistemologist I found that thinking about computers as mediators between children and ideas led me to a better understanding of several aspects of ideas--of some particular ideas, of the nature of ideas in general, and especially of how they come to inhabit people." 

 So with all the technological advances, what's changed?

(722) "I have written elsewhere about ideas that are usually not (but should be) counted as appropriate for children to learn; here I concentrate on the ideas that have been brought into School's framework but have been deformed in the process." 

 What differentiates the two?  Why do some escape deformation (and instruction)?

 (722) "Enter a constructivist who says: Michael will have a better relationship with the manipulation of fractions if he discovers the rules himself.  So situations are created (often with great ingenuity) that will lead children to "discover" the rules of arithmetic.  But being made to "discover" what someone else (and someone you may  not even like) wants you to discover (and already knows!) is not Michael's idea of an exciting intellectual adventure.  The idea of invention has been tamed and has lost its essence. [...]   The failure of the constructivist to meet Michael's need represents a double whammy of disempowerment.  Jean Piaget's very strong idea that all learning takes place by discovery is emasculated by its translation into the common practice known in schools as "discovery learning."  It is disempowered in part because discovery stops being discovery when it is orchestrated to happen on the preset agenda of a curriculum but also in large part because the ideas being learned are disempowered.  For example, the idea of rules for manipulating numbers was historically one of the most powerful ideas ever and in the right context can still be.  But no child would ever suspect that from its presentation in school as a rather boring routine.  Setting ourselves the task of re-empowering the ideas being learned is also a step toward re-empowering the idea of learning by discovery."

 For a long time, I didn't get what was weird about the sleight-of-hand that a lot of educational reform reduces to.  The strange thing about it is that

 (723) "Or consider the cognitivist who says: Michael will have a better relationship with fractions if he understands the concepts behind them.  This might be so if he could really understand how the invention of fractions was as awesome as the invention of the mousetrap and how the intellectual methods that were used to invent fractions could be used to make new inventions of his own.  But the cognitivists are not trying to recreate the intellectual situation in which fractions were invented--and (as far as I can see) could not do so in the context of an elementary school math class.  They simply want Michael to see the connection between one set of ideas about which he does not care and another similar set." 

 "The concepts behind" is a vague and dangerous idea (dangerous, for its ambiguity).

(725) "The psychologist is talking about behaviors.  The epistemologist is talking about ideas." 

 This idea aversion is a pretty powerful theme: consider extending "behavior" to "performance": it's the dissonance between behavior and idea that makes testing silly.

(727) "The sense of power comes her efrom being able to solve well-known or self-generated problems, puzzles, and paradozes from personal knowledge using very general techniques that are all part of what I call "technological fluency."" 

 simulate

(727) Toward a theory of idea power:

• powerful in its use
• powerful in its connections
• powerful in its roots and its fit with personal identity
  

(728)  "The difference between these two conceptions of the role of programming ins of the same kind as the difference between the to interpretations of Piaget: in both cases the crucial difference is between primacy of epistemological (talking about ideas) and primacy of the psychological (talking about how a person is affected by a treatment)." 

 I need to flesh out and generalize this error: it's very, very common.

(728) @toread Papert's The Children's Machine

(728) @toread Pallidino's The Edison Trait: Saving the Spirit of Your Nonconforming Child 

(728) @toread Tyack and Cuban's Tinkering Towards Utopia: A Century of School Reform 

(728) @toread Harel's Children Designers: Interdisciplinary Constructions for learning and Knowing Mathematics in a Computer-Rich School 

 (728) @toread Dahaene's The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics

 

(728) @toread Cavallo's Technological Fluency and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance