I had the opportunity to refer to this in a recent conversation. I’m just going to leave it here for now.
Imagine a country that has a highly developed culture: poetry, philosophy, science, mathematics, but nobody has yet learned to write; it just hadn’t occurred to them to have pencil and paper or even to write with sticks in the sand. One day somebody develops the idea of written language and the pencil and paper are invented. Very quickly this thing, which becomes known as information and communication technology, ICT for short, is picked up by scientists and by world traders. It has a big impact in those areas, and after awhile somebody wonders why we don’t introduce this into our schools. These being cautious people, they decide that it is too risky to give every child one of these new technologies so they put one pencil in every classroom. ‘If that produces good results’, they thought, ‘we’ll maybe produce two pencils in the classroom’, and so on.
Seymour Papert, 2001
