Powerful Ideas

[[Seymour Papert] told us in the 1960s that education should be about powerful ideas, in Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. This is a short list of ideas, divided into the feeble and the powerful. There are many more.

Feeble Ideas

• Teaching
• Facts
• Dates
• Right answers
• Testing
• Curricula

Powerful Ideas

• Ideas
• Children
• Learning
• Tools
• Truth, including how we decide what is true (Epistemology)
• Reality, including how we decide hat is real (Ontology)
• Ethics, specifically what we should do even if we don't want to, and what to do next
• Fun
• Possibility and necessity
• Fruitful questions
• Discovery
• Scientific method--Conjecture, hypothesis, theory, prediction, experiment, observation, error analysis, insight, falsification.
• Connections
• Collaboration
• Gears and linkages
• Math: Patterns, structures, conjectures, theorems, theories, interconnections, equivalences
• Logic
• Programming paradigms
• Maps
• Symbols
• Human rights
• Society: politics, government, services, oppression, war
• Design
• Unanswerable questions