Feliz Año, Happy new year!
No hice posts en la época navideña, ya que me parecÃa bien descansar…. pero ahora ya estamos de vuelta y las ideas empezaron a turbinar nuevamente. Bueno, I just read a nice interview with Seymour Papert y Marvin Minsky, on the last (January) Communications of the ACM (www.acm.org). Minsky says something that leaves you breathless: “
The school day is designed to keep you from thinking deeply about a problem
.”
Then Papert adds: “Connecting math to things that you don’t care about doesn’t help even if they belong to everyday life.” True and beautifully expressed… This clarifies why math is ill-taught almost everywhere, and people tend to self-illude … (“Don’t underestimate the power of denial” -American Beauty).
The problem is that we might deny our children sophisticated and rigorous thinking skills (those acquired with the discipline of mathematics and programming) which they would need with physics, philosophy, etc.
However, Papert suggests something that also is literally beautiful: “
The key educational task is to make connections between powerful ideas and passionate interests.
” Over.
PS> Minsky’s latest work: The Emotion Machine
>To read his draft follow the link in Minsky‘s page: http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky
