Recently I've bought the translation of Children's Machine by Seymour Papert in Portuguese for my girlfriend. Having a justifiable belief on Papert's ideas obviously I've read it the fastest as I could also ;)

This is a classic from the point of view of pedagogy. But let me first give some context. Papert (www.papert.org) is the father of constructionism, LOGO and a lot of powerful ideas. His beliefs on the power of technology, if used to enhance human capabilities as a support for creativity, to produce mega change in School (with a capital S to mean our current educational system) are developing since the 60's. In my opinion his works are paramount if one wants to understand the technology world as it is, because they influenced directly Alan Kay at his time at Xerox, and lead to the personal computing revolution.

The children's machine was written in 1993, before the web and when the PC revolution was in full motion. In it we encounter a very friendly and close dialog with one of the greatest genius of the computer age. We encounter several insights about epistemology, some of them dating from the time Papert spent with Piaget in the 60's, but updated to the current times.

Papert also makes explicit something that was more hidden in his other book Mindstorms, the concept of demanding permissiveness. Basically that means that a more libertarian and open education does not mean less work and responsibility. Much to the opposite, even though the results are more fun and efficient. One analogy that I found useful is that even though a system can have many successful outcomes, that does not mean that it has no unsuccessful ones.

His concept of mathetic is also La borated more profoundly. He argues that there is a word for the art and science of teaching (pedagogy) but not one for learning. He then proposes Mathetic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathetics) as a good candidate. The purpose is not to establish mathetic in itself, but to get some term to mean it, to make thinking and having a point of view about it more easy and feasible. (As Alan Kay says, a point of view is worth 80 IQ points)

I'll follow the translator in his recommendation of the book for teachers, parents, educators and professionals of TI. I'll add that it is crucial for anyone who want to know how to better learn anything. That audience I believe includes anyone who wishes to live a better life.