Principals: The Big Thinkers
grades limits how well this knowledge can be spread and prevents the most potent sort of teaching potential: every child being a teacher. Teachers, Papert maintains, are professionals in the art of helping people learn. Rather than being a technician, the teacher is more like a philosopher, having to lead discussions of much more profound questions than a simple “tell and test” curriculum allows.
general learning theory Papert observes that there is no word for learning that parallels the relationship of the words pedagogy and teaching. This, he maintains, reflects an approach to school leadership that is old and now wrong-headed, in which children are forced to stop “learning” so that they can instead be “taught”. For Papert, everyone should be a learner, both teachers and children.
The Anti-Theories: The Theories With Which We Disagree There are some theoretical viewpoints that contrast with those discussed above but which are well established, so we will discuss those briefly here, lest they are inadvertently adopted as common practice. John Locke proposed the notion that children are a Tabula Rasa (Blank Slate), onto which anything can be written, we might call them nowadays a blank page in an open book. We can give children new experiences that expand their minds and which they accept at face value. In a similar manner, B.F. Skinner was a firm advocate of the idea of behaviourism: that children (or indeed anyone) can be “conditioned” to behave in a certain way if appropriately motivated. The classic example of this is “Pavlov’s dogs” who hear the ringing of a bell shortly before they are fed and, after a period of conditioning, then salivate simply at the sound of a bell as they are conditioned to believe that food will soon arrive. There is much about these two theories that is patently true. New experiences can be given to children that open up new and hitherto unexplored vistas in their minds. However, we ignore learners’ social contexts at our peril. The learner is not an open book or empty vessel, but
John Locke 1632 - 1704
has a framework or world-view through which they approach new experiences. For instance, a young child told his mother that he had learnt that “Jesus died on a crossing,” because his world view did not include the possibility of crosses, or crosses that were big enough to nail a person to. He did however know about railways crossings and that if you weren’t careful you could be killed on one. This social context is the basis of children’s initial thoughts, the starting point from which they start to explore
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