Tim Bulkeley

When I read Seymour Papert’s “Gears of My Childhood”  I took him to be saying: we fit new things (information, ideas...) into frameworks of understanding we already have, which they sometimes extend, our emotional responses to ideas (areas of knowledge, objects associated with them) is vital for our learning, we learn what we love and love what we learn. For me the most surprising thing was that these ideas seem new. They (and the experience, though not so young, and not the gears) fit so well with my own experience I wonder how they can be unknown, or if known unrecognised... or is it just that “education systems” have difficulty fitting “love” into their system of “gears” and so pretend not to know this experience?

In a sense that's already a big question to think more about, the nearest I come to disagreeing (or that sort of questioning) is the notion in the conclusion that “computers [can become] instruments flexible enough so that many children can each create for themselves something like what the gears were for [Papert].” I guess I need to read the book ;)