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
- Learned Helplessness, inability to learn on one's own
- Nationalism
- Specialization
Powerful Ideas
- Ideas
- Children
- Learning
- Tools
- Truth, including how we decide what is true (Epistemology)
- Reality, including how we decide what 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
- Resilience