Top 35 Seymour Papert Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can’t teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it.”

— Seymour Papert

2. “The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.”

— Seymour Papert

3. “I am convinced that the best learning takes place when the learner takes charge.”

— Seymour Papert

4. “You can’t think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.”

— Seymour Papert

5. “Now more people are doing work that requires individual decision-making and problem-solving, and we need an educational system that will help develop those skills.”

— Seymour Papert

6. “The reason most kids don’t like school is not that the work is too hard, but that it is utterly boring.”

— Seymour Papert

7. “Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum don’t seem to understand. You’ll never see a video game being advertised as being easy. Kids who do not like school will tell you it’s not because it’s too hard. It’s because it’s – boring.”

— Seymour Papert

8. “A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.”

— Seymour Papert

9. “The goal is to teach in such a way as to produce the most learning from the least teaching.”

— Seymour Papert

10. “Rather than pushing children to think like adults, we might do better to remember that they are great learners and to try harder to be more like them.”

— Seymour Papert

11. “Do away with curriculum. Do away with segregation by age. And do away with the idea that there should be uniformity of all schools and of what people learn.”

— Seymour Papert

12. “It’s not what you know about the computer that’s important, but your ability to do things with it. By studying French in an academic setting, you get to know a lot about it, but typically, you can’t express yourself well or have an interesting conversation with it.”

— Seymour Papert

13. “Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed in a classroom where nothing else is changed.”

— Seymour Papert

14. “Often kids in a computer lab learn about word-processing, but if they want to write an essay, they write it by hand. This is exactly the opposite of what you want them to learn. They’re approaching the computer as just another abstract school subject.”

— Seymour Papert

15. “Nothing bothers me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.”

— Seymour Papert

16. “BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.”

— Seymour Papert

17. “I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.”

— Seymour Papert

18. “There’s a tendency to make jazzy educational software that’s very uniform and therefore just like school. I’d like to see a company develop software for rebellious kids who don’t want to go to school.”

— Seymour Papert

19. “The mathophobia endemic in contemporary culture blocks many people from learning anything they recognize as ‘math,’ although they may have no trouble with mathematical knowledge they do not perceive as such.”

— Seymour Papert

20. “What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate.”

— Seymour Papert

21. “Adults have been brainwashed into thinking that they can’t really learn about computers without being taught, so it’s more difficult for them to feel comfortable with a computer. Deep down, I think they’re afraid of learning about computers.”

— Seymour Papert

22. “If a kid really is retarded and can only come up to a certain level, he will still have more success if what he learns is connected with something important to him.”

— Seymour Papert

23. “Our goal in education should be to foster the ability to use the computer in everything you do, even if you don’t have a specific piece of software for the job.”

— Seymour Papert

24. “I don’t like MTV, and I don’t like the culture that goes with it. It’s OK in very small doses, maybe. Nevertheless, it’s a social reality and has influenced how kids perceive things around them, the pace of life and the way people do things.”

— Seymour Papert

25. “I prefer software where kids build something and run into problems they have to solve.”

— Seymour Papert

26. “The first thing to note is that pornography and many abductions occur apart from the use of computers, and that most child abuse happens within the family. So I think the extra degree of danger that computers pose doesn’t justify the frenzy.”

— Seymour Papert

27. “In many schools today, the phrase “computer-aided instruction” means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.”

— Seymour Papert

28. “If children really want to learn something, and have the opportunity to learn it in use, they do so even if the teaching is poor. For example many learn difficult video games with no professional teaching at all!”

— Seymour Papert

29. “Similarly, computer literacy courses tend to produce computer people who know a lot about computers or a piece of software but they don’t help people become fluent with the machine.”

— Seymour Papert

30. “I think Disney is a very interesting company, and it does have an extremely powerful means for projecting a certain way of thinking.”

— Seymour Papert

31. “Progressive teachers knew very well how to use the computer for their own ends as an instrument of change; School knew very well how to nip this subversion in the bud.”

— Seymour Papert

32. “I tell adults about the experiences of more than a hundred teachers I’ve interviewed. They tell me that allowing the child to help them learn helped them become better teachers. That’s because they no longer had to pretend they were the experts – not only about computers but about other things.”

— Seymour Papert

33. “Parents can learn that parental authority doesn’t depend on knowing everything. The more you pretend, the more risk that it’ll be traumatic and damaging to the kids and their relationship with you when they find out the truth.”

— Seymour Papert

34. “Corporate America needs to get its act together to see that the education system is changed so it produces what it needs. The educational system that teaches kids to be passive recipients of knowledge worked when most workers were sitting in assembly lines.”

— Seymour Papert

35. “Working with the computer gives rise to many opportunities to transcend asocial behavior, because it produces exciting and visually interesting things to share, whether it’s by creating video games, computer art or sharing exciting Web sites.”

— Seymour Papert

36. “I think we should allow for schools within schools, where 100 out of 500 kids may be organized by the way they work and what they do, and what they do often is more progressive. I would like to see a lot of kids of different ages, maybe even some adults, work together on a project.”

— Seymour Papert

37. “But the interesting cases are those where the conflict remains obstinately in place however much we ponder the problem. These are the cases where we are tempted to conclude that “intuition cannot be trusted.” In these situations we need to improve our intuition, to debug it, but the pressure on us is to abandon intuition and rely on equations instead.”

— Seymour Papert