We often treat children as if they're not very competent to do anything on their own. So we make them stop learning in a natural way - by exploring. Logo [the computer programming language ] allows them to find their way around the computer, as they would find their way around the house, uncontaminated by the bureaucracies of schools.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.