This article is from the current July issue of the Atlantic Monthly. I
share it in this space for those groups working on computer access
projects in their local schools. Realize that the only group of students
to have documented evidence of a benifit of classroom computers is
children with disabilities.
kelly
m_side picture The Computer Delusion
There is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly
improve teaching and learning, yet school districts are cutting
programs -- music, art, physical education -- that enrich children's
lives to make room for this dubious nostrum, and the Clinton
Administration has embraced the goal of "computers in every classroom"
with credulous and costly enthusiasm
by Todd Oppenheimer
Dangerous Policies
I N 1922 Thomas Edison predicted that "the motion picture is destined
to revolutionize our educational system and ... in a few years it will
supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks." Twenty-three
years later, in 1945, William Levenson, the director of the Cleveland
public schools' radio station, claimed that "the time may come when a
portable radio receiver will be as common in the classroom as is the
blackboard." Forty years after that the noted psychologist B. F.
Skinner, referring to the first days of his "teaching machines," in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote, "I was soon saying that, with
the help of teaching machines and programmed instruction, students
could learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as
in a standard classroom." Ten years after Skinner's recollections were
published, President Bill Clinton campaigned for "a bridge to the
twenty-first century ... where computers are as much a part of the
classroom as blackboards." Clinton was not alone in his enthusiasm for
a program estimated to cost somewhere between $40 billion and $100
billion over the next five years. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich,
talking about computers to the Republican National Committee early
this year, said, "We could do so much to make education available
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, that people could
literally have a whole different attitude toward learning."
If history really is repeating itself, the schools are in serious
trouble. In Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology
Since 1920 (1986), Larry Cuban, a professor of education at Stanford
University and a former school superintendent, observed that as
successive rounds of new technology failed their promoters'
expectations, a pattern emerged. The cycle began with big promises
backed by the technology developers' research. In the classroom,
however, teachers never really embraced the new tools, and no
significant academic improvement occurred. This provoked consistent
responses: the problem was money, spokespeople argued, or teacher
resistance, or the paralyzing school bureaucracy. Meanwhile, few
people questioned the technology advocates' claims. As results
continued to lag, the blame was finally laid on the machines. Soon
schools were sold on the next generation of technology, and the
lucrative cycle started all over again.
Today's technology evangels argue that we've learned our lesson from
past mistakes. As in each previous round, they say that when our new
hot technology -- the computer -- is compared with yesterday's,
today's is better. "It can do the same things, plus," Richard Riley,
the U.S. Secretary of Education, told me this spring.
How much better is it, really?
The promoters of computers in schools again offer prodigious research
showing improved academic achievement after using their technology.
The research has again come under occasional attack, but this time
quite a number of teachers seem to be backing classroom technology. In
a poll taken early last year U.S. teachers ranked computer skills and
media technology as more "essential" than the study of European
history, biology, chemistry, and physics; than dealing with social
problems such as drugs and family breakdown; than learning practical
job skills; and than reading modern American writers such as Steinbeck
and Hemingway or classic ones such as Plato and Shakespeare.
In keeping with these views New Jersey cut state aid to a number of
school districts this past year and then spent $10 million on
classroom computers. In Union City, California, a single school
district is spending $27 million to buy new gear for a mere eleven
schools. The Kittridge Street Elementary School, in Los Angeles,
killed its music program last year to hire a technology coordinator;
in Mansfield, Massachusetts, administrators dropped proposed teaching
positions in art, music, and physical education, and then spent
$333,000 on computers; in one Virginia school the art room was turned
into a computer laboratory. (Ironically, a half dozen preliminary
studies recently suggested that music and art classes may build the
physical size of a child's brain, and its powers for subjects such as
language, math, science, and engineering -- in one case far more than
computer work did.) Meanwhile, months after a New Technology High
School opened in Napa, California, where computers sit on every
student's desk and all academic classes use computers, some students
were complaining of headaches, sore eyes, and wrist pain.
Throughout the country, as spending on technology increases, school
book purchases are stagnant. Shop classes, with their tradition of
teaching children building skills with wood and metal, have been
almost entirely replaced by new "technology education programs." In
San Francisco only one public school still offers a full shop
program -- the lone vocational high school. "We get kids who don't
know the difference between a screwdriver and a ball peen hammer,"
James Dahlman, the school's vocational-department chair, told me
recently. "How are they going to make a career choice? Administrators
are stuck in this mindset that all kids will go to a four-year college
and become a doctor or a lawyer, and that's not true. I know some who
went to college, graduated, and then had to go back to technical
school to get a job." Last year the school superintendent in Great
Neck, Long Island, proposed replacing elementary school shop classes
with computer classes and training the shop teachers as computer
coaches. Rather than being greeted with enthusiasm, the proposal
provoked a backlash.
Interestingly, shop classes and field trips are two programs that the
National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council, the Clinton
Administration's technology task force, suggests reducing in order to
shift resources into computers. But are these results what technology
promoters really intend?" You need to apply common sense," Esther
Dyson, the president of EDventure Holdings and one of the task force's
leading school advocates, told me recently. "Shop with a good teacher
probably is worth more than computers with a lousy teacher. But if
it's a poor program, this may provide a good excuse for cutting it.
There will be a lot of trials and errors with this. And I don't know
how to prevent those errors."
The issue, perhaps, is the magnitude of the errors. Alan Lesgold, a
professor of psychology and the associate director of the Learning
Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, calls
the computer an "amplifier," because it encourages both enlightened
study practices and thoughtless ones. There's a real risk, though,
that the thoughtless practices will dominate, slowly dumbing down huge
numbers of tomorrow's adults. As Sherry Turkle, a professor of the
sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
a longtime observer of children's use of computers, told me, "The
possibilities of using this thing poorly so outweigh the chance of
using it well, it makes people like us, who are fundamentally
optimistic about computers, very reticent."
Perhaps the best way to separate fact from fantasy is to take
supporters' claims about computerized learning one by one and compare
them with the evidence in the academic literature and in the everyday
experiences I have observed or heard about in a variety of classrooms.
Five main arguments underlie the campaign to computerize our nation's
schools.
Computers improve both teaching practices and student achievement.
Computer literacy should be taught as early as possible; otherwise
students will be left behind.
To make tomorrow's work force competitive in an increasingly
high-tech world, learning computer skills must be a priority.
Technology programs leverage support from the business community --
badly needed today because schools are increasingly starved for funds.
Work with computers -- particularly using the Internet -- brings
students valuable connections with teachers, other schools and
students, and a wide network of professionals around the globe. These
connections spice the school day with a sense of real-world relevance,
and broaden the educational community.
"The Filmstrips of the 1990s"
C LINTON's vision of computerized classrooms arose partly out of the
findings of the presidential task force -- thirty-six leaders from
industry, education, and several interest groups who have guided the
Administration's push to get computers into the schools. The report of
the task force, "Connecting K-12 Schools to the Information
Superhighway" (produced by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.), begins
by citing numerous studies that have apparently proved that computers
enhance student achievement significantly. One "meta-analysis" (a
study that reviews other studies -- in this case 130 of them) reported
that computers had improved performance in "a wide range of subjects,
including language arts, math, social studies and science." Another
found improved organization and focus in students' writing. A third
cited twice the normal gains in math skills. Several schools boasted
of greatly improved attendance.
Unfortunately, many of these studies are more anecdotal than
conclusive. Some, including a giant, oft-cited meta-analysis of 254
studies, lack the necessary scientific controls to make solid
conclusions possible. The circumstances are artificial and not easily
repeated, results aren't statistically reliable, or, most frequently,
the studies did not control for other influences, such as differences
between teaching methods. This last factor is critical, because
computerized learning inevitably forces teachers to adjust their
style -- only sometimes for the better. Some studies were
industry-funded, and thus tended to publicize mostly positive
findings. "The research is set up in a way to find benefits that
aren't really there," Edward Miller, a former editor of the Harvard
Education Letter, says. "Most knowledgeable people agree that most of
the research isn't valid. It's so flawed it shouldn't even be called
research. Essentially, it's just worthless." Once the faulty studies
are weeded out, Miller says, the ones that remain "are
inconclusive" -- that is, they show no significant change in either
direction. Even Esther Dyson admits the studies are undependable. "I
don't think those studies amount to much either way," she says. "In
this area there is little proof."
Why are solid conclusions so elusive? Look at Apple Computer's
"Classrooms of Tomorrow," perhaps the most widely studied effort to
teach using computer technology. In the early 1980s Apple shrewdly
realized that donating computers to schools might help not only
students but also company sales, as Apple's ubiquity in classrooms
turned legions of families into Apple loyalists. Last year, after the
San Jose Mercury News (published in Apple's Silicon Valley home) ran a
series questioning the effectiveness of computers in schools, the
paper printed an opinion-page response from Terry Crane, an Apple
vice-president. "Instead of isolating students," Crane wrote,
"technology actually encouraged them to collaborate more than in
traditional classrooms. Students also learned to explore and represent
information dynamically and creatively, communicate effectively about
complex processes, become independent learners and self-starters and
become more socially aware and confident."
Crane didn't mention that after a decade of effort and the donation of
equipment worth more than $25 million to thirteen schools, there is
scant evidence of greater student achievement. To be fair, educators
on both sides of the computer debate acknowledge that today's tests of
student achievement are shockingly crude. They're especially weak in
measuring intangibles such as enthusiasm and self-motivation, which do
seem evident in Apple's classrooms and other computer-rich schools. In
any event, what is fun and what is educational may frequently be at
odds. "Computers in classrooms are the filmstrips of the 1990s,"
Clifford Stoll, the author of Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on
the Information Highway (1995), told The New York Times last year,
recalling his own school days in the 1960s. "We loved them because we
didn't have to think for an hour, teachers loved them because they
didn't have to teach, and parents loved them because it showed their
schools were high-tech. But no learning happened."
Stoll somewhat overstates the case -- obviously, benefits can come
from strengthening a student's motivation. Still, Apple's computers
may bear less responsibility for that change than Crane suggests. In
the beginning, when Apple did little more than dump computers in
classrooms and homes, this produced no real results, according to Jane
David, a consultant Apple hired to study its classroom initiative.
Apple quickly learned that teachers needed to change their classroom
approach to what is commonly called "project-oriented learning." This
is an increasingly popular teaching method, in which students learn
through doing and teachers act as facilitators or partners rather than
as didacts. (Teachers sometimes refer to this approach, which arrived
in classrooms before computers did, as being "the guide on the side
instead of the sage on the stage.") But what the students learned "had
less to do with the computer and more to do with the teaching," David
concluded. "If you took the computers out, there would still be good
teaching there." This story is heard in school after school, including
two impoverished schools -- Clear View Elementary School, in southern
California, and the Christopher Columbus middle school, in New
Jersey -- that the Clinton Administration has loudly celebrated for
turning themselves around with computers. At Christopher Columbus, in
fact, students' test scores rose before computers arrived, not
afterward, because of relatively basic changes:longer class periods,
new books, after-school programs, and greater emphasis on student
projects and collaboration.
During recent visits to some San Francisco-area schools I could see
what it takes for students to use computers properly, and why most
don't.
On a bluff south of downtown San Francisco, in the middle of one of
the city's lower-income neighborhoods, Claudia Schaffner, a
tenth-grader, tapped away at a multimedia machine in a computer lab at
Thurgood Marshall Academic High School, one of half a dozen special
technology schools in the city. Schaffner was using a physics program
to simulate the trajectory of a marble on a small roller coaster. "It
helps to visualize it first, like 'A is for Apple' with
kindergartners," Schaffner told me, while mousing up and down the
virtual roller coaster. "I can see how the numbers go into action."
This was lunch hour, and the students' excitement about what they can
do in this lab was palpable. Schaffner could barely tear herself away.
"I need to go eat some food," she finally said, returning within
minutes to eat a rice dish at the keyboard.
Schaffner's teacher is Dennis Frezzo, an electrical-engineering
graduate from the University of California at Berkeley. Despite his
considerable knowledge of computer programming, Frezzo tries to keep
classwork focused on physical projects. For a mere $8,000, for
example, several teachers put together a multifaceted robotics lab,
consisting of an advanced Lego engineering kit and twenty-four old
386-generation computers. Frezzo's students used these materials to
build a tiny electric car, whose motion was to be triggered by a light
sensor. When the light sensor didn't work, the students figured out
why. "That's a real problem -- what you'd encounter in the real
world," Frezzo told me. "I prefer they get stuck on small real-world
problems instead of big fake problems" -- like the simulated natural
disasters that fill one popular educational game. "It's sort of the
Zen approach to education," Frezzo said. "It's not the big problems.
Isaac Newton already solved those. What come up in life are the little
ones."
It's one thing to confront technology's complexity at a high school --
especially one that's blessed with four different computer labs and
some highly skilled teachers like Frezzo, who know enough, as he put
it, "to keep computers in their place." It's quite another to grapple
with a high-tech future in the lower grades, especially at everyday
schools that lack special funding or technical support. As evidence,
when U.S. News & World Report published a cover story last fall on
schools that make computers work, five of the six were high schools --
among them Thurgood Marshall. Although the sixth was an elementary
school, the featured program involved children with disabilities --
the one group that does show consistent benefits from computerized
instruction.
The digital experience
Artificial Experience
C ONSIDER the scene at one elementary school, Sanchez, which sits on
the edge of San Francisco's Latino community. For several years
Sanchez, like many other schools, has made do with a roomful of basic
Apple IIes. Last year, curious about what computers could do for
youngsters, a local entrepreneur donated twenty costly Power
Macintoshes -- three for each of five classrooms, and one for each of
the five lucky teachers to take home. The teachers who got the new
machines were delighted. "It's the best thing we've ever done," Adela
Najarro, a third-grade bilingual teacher, told me. She mentioned one
boy, perhaps with a learning disability, who had started to hate
school. Once he had a computer to play with, she said, "his whole
attitude changed." Najarro is now a true believer, even when it comes
to children without disabilities. "Every single child," she said,
"will do more work for you and do better work with a computer. Just
because it's on a monitor, kids pay more attention. There's this magic
to the screen."
Down the hall from Najarro's classroom her colleague Rose Marie Ortiz
had a more troubled relationship with computers. On the morning I
visited, Ortiz took her bilingual special-education class of second-,
third-, and fourth-graders into the lab filled with the old Apple
IIes. The students look forward to this weekly expedition so much that
Ortiz gets exceptional behavior from them all morning. Out of date
though these machines are, they do offer a range of exercises, in
subjects such as science, math, reading, social studies, and problem
solving. But owing to this group's learning problems and limited
English skills, math drills were all that Ortiz could give them.
Nonetheless, within minutes the kids were excitedly navigating their
way around screens depicting floating airplanes and trucks carrying
varying numbers of eggs. As the children struggled, many resorted to
counting in whatever way they knew how. Some squinted at the screen,
painstakingly moving their fingers from one tiny egg symbol to the
next. "Tres, cuatro, cinco, seis ... ," one little girl said loudly,
trying to hear herself above her counting neighbors. Another girl kept
a piece of paper handy, on which she marked a line for each egg.
Several others resorted to the slow but tried and true -- their
fingers. Some just guessed. Once the children arrived at answers, they
frantically typed them onto the screen, hoping it would advance to
something fun, the way Nintendos, Game Boys, and video-arcade games
do. Sometimes their answers were right, and the screen did advance;
sometimes they weren't; but the children were rarely discouraged. As
schoolwork goes, this was a blast.
"It's highly motivating for them," Ortiz said as she rushed from
machine to machine, attending not to math questions but to computer
glitches. Those she couldn't fix she simply abandoned. "I don't know
how practical it is. You see," she said, pointing to a girl counting
on her fingers, "these kids still need the hands-on" -- meaning the
opportunity to manipulate physical objects such as beans or colored
blocks. The value of hands-on learning, child-development experts
believe, is that it deeply imprints knowledge into a young child's
brain, by transmitting the lessons of experience through a variety of
sensory pathways. "Curiously enough," the educational psychologist
Jane Healy wrote in Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think and
What We Can Do About It (1990), "visual stimulation is probably not
the main access route to nonverbal reasoning. Body movements, the
ability to touch, feel, manipulate, and build sensory awareness of
relationships in the physical world, are its main foundations." The
problem, Healy wrote, is that "in schools, traditionally, the senses
have had little status after kindergarten."
Ortiz believes that the computer-lab time, brief as it is, dilutes her
students' attention to language. "These kids are all
language-delayed," she said. Though only modest sums had so far been
spent at her school, Ortiz and other local teachers felt that the push
was on for technology over other scholastic priorities. The year
before, Sanchez had let its librarian go, to be replaced by a
part-timer.
When Ortiz finally got the students rounded up and out the door, the
kids were still worked up. "They're never this wired after reading
group," she said. "They're usually just exhausted, because I've been
reading with them, making them write and talk." Back in homeroom Ortiz
showed off the students' monthly handwritten writing samples. "Now,
could you do that on the computer?" she asked. "No, because we'd be
hung up on finding the keys." So why does Ortiz bother taking her
students to the computer lab at all? "I guess I come in here for the
computer literacy. If everyone else is getting it, I feel these kids
should get it too."
Some computerized elementary school programs have avoided these
pitfalls, but the record subject by subject is mixed at best. Take
writing, where by all accounts and by my own observations the computer
does encourage practice -- changes are easier to make on a keyboard
than with an eraser, and the lettering looks better. Diligent students
use these conveniences to improve their writing, but the less
committed frequently get seduced by electronic opportunities to make a
school paper look snazzy. (The easy "cut and paste"function in today's
word-processing programs, for example, is apparently encouraging many
students to cobble together research materials without thinking them
through.) Reading programs get particularly bad reviews. One small but
carefully controlled study went so far as to claim that Reader Rabbit,
a reading program now used in more than 100,000 schools, caused
students to suffer a 50 percent drop in creativity. (Apparently, after
forty-nine students used the program for seven months, they were no
longer able to answer open-ended questions and showed a markedly
diminished ability to brainstorm with fluency and originality.) What
about hard sciences, which seem so well suited to computer study?
Logo, the high-profile programming language refined by Seymour Papert
and widely used in middle and high schools, fostered huge hopes of
expanding children's cognitive skills. As students directed the
computer to build things, such as geometric shapes, Papert believed,
they would learn "procedural thinking," similar to the way a computer
processes information. According to a number of studies, however, Logo
has generally failed to deliver on its promises. Judah Schwartz, a
professor of education at Harvard and a co-director of the school's
Educational Technology Center, told me that a few newer applications,
when used properly, can dramatically expand children's math and
science thinking by giving them new tools to "make and explore
conjectures."Still, Schwartz acknowledges that perhaps "ninety-nine
percent" of the educational programs are "terrible, really terrible."
Even in success stories important caveats continually pop up. The best
educational software is usually complex -- most suited to older
students and sophisticated teachers. In other cases the schools have
been blessed with abundance -- fancy equipment, generous financial
support, or extra teachers -- that is difficult if not impossible to
duplicate in the average school. Even if it could be duplicated, the
literature suggests, many teachers would still struggle with
technology. Computers suffer frequent breakdowns; when they do work,
their seductive images often distract students from the lessons at
hand -- which many teachers say makes it difficult to build meaningful
rapport with their students.
With such a discouraging record of student and teacher performance
with computers, why has the Clinton Administration focused so narrowly
on the hopeful side of the story? Part of the answer may lie in the
makeup of the Administration's technology task force. Judging from
accounts of the task force's deliberations, all thirty-six members are
unequivocal technology advocates. Two thirds of them work in the
high-tech and entertainment industries. The effect of the group's tilt
can be seen in its report. Its introduction adopts the authoritative
posture of impartial fact-finder, stating that "this report does not
attempt to lay out a national blueprint, nor does it recommend
specific public policy goals." But it comes pretty close. Each chapter
describes various strategies for getting computers into classrooms,
and the introduction acknowledges that "this report does not evaluate
the relative merits of competing demands on educational funding (e.g.,
more computers versus smaller class sizes)."
When I spoke with Esther Dyson and other task-force members about what
discussion the group had had about the potential downside of
computerized education, they said there hadn't been any. And when I
asked Linda Roberts, Clinton's lead technology adviser in the
Department of Education, whether the task force was influenced by any
self-interest, she said no, quite the opposite: the group's charter
actually gave its members license to help the technology industry
directly, but they concentrated on schools because that's where they
saw the greatest need.
That sense of need seems to have been spreading outside Washington.
Last summer a California task force urged the state to spend $11
billion on computers in California schools, which have struggled for
years under funding cuts that have driven academic achievement down to
among the lowest levels in the nation. This task force, composed of
forty-six teachers, parents, technology experts, and business
executives, concluded, "More than any other single measure, computers
and network technologies, properly implemented, offer the greatest
potential to right what's wrong with our public schools." Other
options mentioned in the group's report -- reducing class size,
improving teachers' salaries and facilities, expanding hours of
instruction -- were considered less important than putting kids in
front of computers.
"Hypertext Minds"
T ODAY'S parents, knowing firsthand how families were burned by
television's false promises, may want some objective advice about the
age at which their children should become computer literate. Although
there are no real guidelines, computer boosters send continual
messages that if children don't begin early, they'll be left behind.
Linda Roberts thinks that there's no particular minimum age -- and no
maximum number of hours that children should spend at a terminal. Are
there examples of excess? "I haven't seen it yet," Roberts told me
with a laugh. In schools throughout the country administrators and
teachers demonstrate the same excitement, boasting about the wondrous
things that children of five or six can do on computers: drawing,
typing, playing with elementary science simulations and other programs
called "educational games."
The schools' enthusiasm for these activities is not universally shared
by specialists in childhood development. The doubters' greatest
concern is for the very young -- preschool through third grade, when a
child is most impressionable. Their apprehension involves two main
issues.
First, they consider it important to give children a broad base --
emotionally, intellectually, and in the five senses -- before
introducing something as technical and one-dimensional as a computer.
Second, they believe that the human and physical world holds greater
learning potential.
The importance of a broad base for a child may be most apparent when
it's missing. In Endangered Minds, Jane Healy wrote of an English
teacher who could readily tell which of her students' essays were
conceived on a computer. "They don't link ideas," the teacher says.
"They just write one thing, and then they write another one, and they
don't seem to see or develop the relationships between them." The
problem, Healy argued, is that the pizzazz of computerized schoolwork
may hide these analytical gaps, which "won't become apparent until
[the student] can't organize herself around a homework assignment or a
job that requires initiative. More commonplace activities, such as
figuring out how to nail two boards together, organizing a game ...
may actually form a better basis for real-world intelligence."
Others believe they have seen computer games expand children's
imaginations. High-tech children "think differently from the rest of
us," William D. Winn, the director of the Learning Center at the
University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, told
Business Week in a recent cover story on the benefits of computer
games. "They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It's as though
their cognitive strategies were parallel, not sequential." Healy
argues the opposite. She and other psychologists think that the
computer screen flattens information into narrow, sequential data.
This kind of material, they believe, exercises mostly one half of the
brain -- the left hemisphere, where primarily sequential thinking
occurs. The "right brain" meanwhile gets short shrift -- yet this is
the hemisphere that works on different kinds of information
simultaneously. It shapes our multi-faceted impressions, and serves as
the engine of creative analysis.
Opinions diverge in part because research on the brain is still so
sketchy, and computers are so new, that the effect of computers on the
brain remains a great mystery. "I don't think we know anything about
it," Harry Chugani, a pediatric neurobiologist at Wayne State
University, told me. This very ignorance makes skeptics wary. "Nobody
knows how kids' internal wiring works," Clifford Stoll wrote in
Silicon Snake Oil, "but anyone who's directed away from social
interactions has a head start on turning out weird.... No computer can
teach what a walk through a pine forest feels like. Sensation has no
substitute."
This points to the conservative developmentalists' second concern: the
danger that even if hours in front of the screen are limited,
unabashed enthusiasm for the computer sends the wrong message: that
the mediated world is more significant than the real one. "It's like
TV commercials," Barbara Scales, the head teacher at the Child Study
Center at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. "Kids get
so hyped up, it can change their expectations about stimulation,
versus what they generate themselves." In Silicon Snake Oil, Michael
Fellows, a computer scientist at the University of Victoria, in
British Columbia, was even blunter. "Most schools would probably be
better off if they threw their computers into the Dumpster."
Faced with such sharply contrasting viewpoints, which are based on
such uncertain ground, how is a responsible policymaker to proceed? "A
prudent society controls its own infatuation with 'progress' when
planning for its young," Healy argued in Endangered Minds.
Unproven technologies ... may offer lively visions, but they can
also be detrimental to the development of the young plastic brain.
The cerebral cortex is a wondrously well-buffered mechanism that
can withstand a good bit of well-intentioned bungling. Yet there is
a point at which fundamental neural substrates for reasoning may be
jeopardized for children who lack proper physical, intellectual, or
emotional nurturance. Childhood -- and the brain -- have their own
imperatives. In development, missed opportunities may be difficult
to recapture.
The problem is that technology leaders rarely include these or other
warnings in their recommendations. When I asked Dyson why the Clinton
task force proceeded with such fervor, despite the classroom
computer's shortcomings, she said, "It's so clear the world is
changing."
Real Job Training
I N the past decade, according to the presidential task force's
report, the number of jobs requiring computer skills has increased
from 25 percent of all jobs in 1983 to 47 percent in 1993. By 2000,
the report estimates, 60 percent of the nation's jobs will demand
these skills -- and pay an average of 10 to 15 percent more than jobs
involving no computer work. Although projections of this sort are far
from reliable, it's a safe bet that computer skills will be needed for
a growing proportion of tomorrow's work force. But what priority
should these skills be given among other studies?
Listen to Tom Henning, a physics teacher at Thurgood Marshall, the San
Francisco technology high school. Henning has a graduate degree in
engineering, and helped to found a Silicon Valley company that
manufactures electronic navigation equipment. "My bias is the physical
reality," Henning told me, as we sat outside a shop where he was
helping students to rebuild an old motorcycle. "I'm no technophobe. I
can program computers." What worries Henning is that computers at best
engage only two senses, hearing and sight -- and only two-dimensional
sight at that. "Even if they're doing three-dimensional computer
modeling, that's still a two-D replica of a three-D world. If you took
a kid who grew up on Nintendo, he's not going to have the necessary
skills. He needs to have done it first with Tinkertoys or clay, or
carved it out of balsa wood." As David Elkind, a professor of child
development at Tufts University, puts it, "A dean of the University of
Iowa's school of engineering used to say the best engineers were the
farm boys," because they knew how machinery really worked.
Surely many employers will disagree, and welcome the commercially
applicable computer skills that today's high-tech training can bring
them. What's striking is how easy it is to find other employers who
share Henning's and Elkind's concerns.
Kris Meisling, a senior geological-research adviser for Mobil Oil,
told me that "people who use computers a lot slowly grow rusty in
their ability to think." Meisling's group creates charts and maps --
some computerized, some not -- to plot where to drill for oil. In
large one-dimensional analyses, such as sorting volumes of seismic
data, the computer saves vast amounts of time, sometimes making
previously impossible tasks easy. This lures people in his field,
Meisling believes, into using computers as much as possible. But when
geologists turn to computers for "interpretive" projects, he finds,
they often miss information, and their oversights are further obscured
by the computer's captivating automatic design functions. This is why
Meisling still works regularly with a pencil and paper -- tools that,
ironically, he considers more interactive than the computer, because
they force him to think implications through.
"You can't simultaneously get an overview and detail with a computer,"
he says. "It's linear. It gives you tunnel vision. What computers can
do well is what can be calculated over and over. What they can't do is
innovation. If you think of some new way to do or look at things and
the software can't do it, you're stuck. So a lot of people think,
'Well, I guess it's a dumb idea, or it's unnecessary.'"
I have heard similar warnings from people in other businesses,
including high-tech enterprises. A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard,
the giant California computer-products company, told me the company
rarely hires people who are predominantly computer experts, favoring
instead those who have a talent for teamwork and are flexible and
innovative. Hewlett-Packard is such a believer in hands-on experience
that since 1992 it has spent $2.6 million helping forty-five school
districts build math and science skills the old-fashioned way -- using
real materials, such as dirt, seeds, water, glass vials, and magnets.
Much the same perspective came from several recruiters in film and
computer-game animation. In work by artists who have spent a lot of
time on computers "you'll see a stiffness or a flatness, a lack of
richness and depth," Karen Chelini, the director of human resources
for LucasArts Entertainment, George Lucas's interactive-games maker,
told me recently. "With traditional art training, you train the eye to
pay attention to body movement. You learn attitude, feeling,
expression. The ones who are good are those who as kids couldn't be
without their sketchbook."
Many jobs obviously will demand basic computer skills if not
sophisticated knowledge. But that doesn't mean that the parents or the
teachers of young students need to panic. Joseph Weizenbaum, a
professor emeritus of computer science at MIT, told the San Jose
Mercury News that even at his technology-heavy institution new
students can learn all the computer skills they need "in a summer."
This seems to hold in the business world, too. Patrick MacLeamy, an
executive vice-president of Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum, the country's
largest architecture firm, recently gave me numerous examples to
illustrate that computers pose no threat to his company's creative
work. Although architecture professors are divided on the value of
computerized design tools, in MacLeamy's opinion they generally
enhance the process. But he still considers "knowledge of the hands"
to be valuable -- today's architects just have to develop it in other
ways. (His firm's answer is through building models.) Nonetheless, as
positive as MacLeamy is about computers, he has found the company's
two-week computer training to be sufficient. In fact, when he's
hiring, computer skills don't enter into his list of priorities. He
looks for a strong character; an ability to speak, write, and
comprehend; and a rich education in the history of architecture.
The Schools that Business Built
N EWSPAPER financial sections carry almost daily pronouncements from
the computer industry and other businesses about their high-tech hopes
for America's schoolchildren. Many of these are joined to
philanthropic commitments to helping schools make curriculum changes.
This sometimes gets businesspeople involved in schools, where they've
begun to understand and work with the many daunting problems that are
unrelated to technology. But if business gains too much influence over
the curriculum, the schools can become a kind of corporate training
center -- largely at taxpayer expense.
For more than a decade scholars and government commissions have
criticized the increasing professionalization of the college years --
frowning at the way traditional liberal arts are being edged out by
hot topics of the moment or strictly business-oriented studies. The
schools' real job, the technology critic Neil Postman argued in his
book The End of Education (1995), is to focus on "how to make a life,
which is quite different from how to make a living." Some see the
arrival of boxes of computer hardware and software in the schools as
taking the commercial trend one step further, down into high school
and elementary grades. "Should you be choosing a career in
kindergarten?" asks Helen Sloss Luey, a social worker and a former
president of San Francisco's Parent Teacher Association. "People need
to be trained to learn and change, while education seems to be getting
more specific."
Indeed it does. The New Technology High School in Napa (the school
where a computer sits on every student's desk) was started by the
school district and a consortium of more than forty businesses. "We
want to be the school that business built," Robert Nolan, a founder of
the school, told me last fall. "We wanted to create an environment
that mimicked what exists in the high-tech business world."
Increasingly, Nolan explained, business leaders want to hire people
specifically trained in the skill they need. One of Nolan's partners,
Ted Fujimoto, of the Landmark Consulting Group, told me that instead
of just asking the business community for financial support, the
school will now undertake a trade: in return for donating funds,
businesses can specify what kinds of employees they want -- "a two-way
street." Sometimes the traffic is a bit heavy in one direction. In
January, The New York Times published a lengthy education supplement
describing numerous examples of how business is increasingly
dominating school software and other curriculum materials, and not
always toward purely educational goals.
People who like the idea that their taxes go to computer training
might be surprised at what a poor investment it can be. Larry Cuban,
the Stanford education professor, writes that changes in the classroom
for which business lobbies rarely hold long-term value. Rather,
they're often guided by labor-market needs that turn out to be
transitory; when the economy shifts, workers are left unprepared for
new jobs. In the economy as a whole, according to a recent story in
The New York Times, performance trends in our schools have shown
virtually no link to the rises and falls in the nation's measures of
productivity and growth. This is one reason that school
traditionalists push for broad liberal-arts curricula, which they feel
develop students' values and intellect, instead of focusing on today's
idea about what tomorrow's jobs will be.
High-tech proponents argue that the best education software does
develop flexible business intellects. In the Business Week story on
computer games, for example, academics and professionals expressed
amazement at the speed, savvy, and facility that young computer jocks
sometimes demonstrate. Several pointed in particular to computer
simulations, which some business leaders believe are becoming
increasingly important in fields ranging from engineering,
manufacturing, and troubleshooting to the tracking of economic
activity and geopolitical risk. The best of these simulations may be
valuable, albeit for strengthening one form of thinking. But the
average simulation program may be of questionable relevance.
Sherry Turkle, the sociology professor at MIT, has studied youngsters
using computers for more than twenty years. In her book Life on the
Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995) she described a
disturbing experience with a simulation game called SimLife. After she
sat down with a thirteen-year-old named Tim, she was stunned at the
way
Tim can keep playing even when he has no idea what is driving
events. For example, when his sea urchins become extinct, I ask him
why.
Tim: "I don't know, it's just something that happens."
ST: "Do you know how to find out why it happened?"
Tim: "No."
ST: "Do you mind that you can't tell why?"
Tim: "No. I don't let things like that bother me. It's not what's
important."
Anecdotes like this lead some educators to worry that as children
concentrate on how to manipulate software instead of on the subject at
hand, learning can diminish rather than grow. Simulations, for
example, are built on hidden assumptions, many of which are
oversimplified if not highly questionable. All too often, Turkle wrote
recently in The American Prospect, "experiences with simulations do
not open up questions but close them down." Turkle's concern is that
software of this sort fosters passivity, ultimately dulling people's
sense of what they can change in the world. There's a tendency, Turkle
told me, "to take things at 'interface' value."Indeed, after mastering
SimCity, a popular game about urban planning, a tenth-grade girl
boasted to Turkle that she'd learned the following rule: "Raising
taxes always leads to riots."
The business community also offers tangible financial support, usually
by donating equipment. Welcome as this is, it can foster a high-tech
habit. Once a school's computer system is set up, the companies often
drop their support. This saddles the school with heavy long-term
responsibilities: maintenance of the computer network and the need for
constant software upgrades and constant teacher training -- the full
burden of which can cost far more than the initial hardware and
software combined. Schools must then look for handouts from other
companies, enter the grant-seeking game, or delicately go begging in
their own communities. "We can go to the well only so often," Toni-Sue
Passantino, the principal of the Bayside Middle School, in San Mateo,
California, told me recently. Last year Bayside let a group of
seventh- and eighth-graders spend eighteen months and countless hours
creating a rudimentary virtual-reality program, with the support of
several high-tech firms. The companies' support ended after that
period, however -- creating a financial speed bump of a kind that the
Rand Corporation noted in a report to the Clinton Administration as a
common obstacle.
School administrators may be outwardly excited about computerized
instruction, but they're also shrewdly aware of these financial
challenges. In March of last year, for instance, when California
launched its highly promoted "NetDay '96" (a campaign to wire 12,000
California schools to the Internet in one day), school participation
was far below expectations, even in technology-conscious San
Francisco. In the city papers school officials wondered how they were
supposed to support an Internet program when they didn't even have the
money to repair crumbling buildings, install electrical outlets, and
hire the dozens of new teachers recently required so as to reduce
class size.
One way around the donation maze is to simplify: use inexpensive,
basic software and hardware, much of which is available through
recycling programs. Such frugality can offer real value in the
elementary grades, especially since basic word-processing tools are
most helpful to children just learning to write. Yet schools, like the
rest of us, can't resist the latest toys. "A lot of people will spend
all their money on fancy new equipment that can do great things, and
sometimes it just gets used for typing classes," Ray Porter, a
computer resource teacher for the San Francisco schools, told me
recently. "Parents, school boards, and the reporters want to see only
razzle-dazzle state-of-the-art."
Internet Isolation
I T is hard to visit a high-tech school without being led by a teacher
into a room where students are communicating with people hundreds or
thousands of miles away -- over the Internet or sometimes through
video-conferencing systems (two-way TV sets that broadcast live from
each room). Video conferences, although fun, are an expensive way to
create classroom thrills. But the Internet, when used carefully,
offers exciting academic prospects -- most dependably, once again, for
older students. In one case schools in different states have tracked
bird migrations and then posted their findings on the World Wide Web,
using it as their own national notebook. In San Francisco eighth-grade
economics students have E-mailed Chinese and Japanese businessmen to
fulfill an assignment on what it would take to build an industrial
plant overseas. Schools frequently use the Web to publish student
writing. While thousands of self-published materials like these have
turned the Web into a worldwide vanity press, the network sometimes
gives young writers their first real audience.
The free nature of Internet information also means that students are
confronted with chaos, and real dangers. "The Net's beauty is that
it's uncontrolled," Stephen Kerr, a professor at the College of
Education at the University of Washington and the editor of Technology
in the Future of Schooling (1996), told me. "It's information by
anyone, for anyone. There's racist stuff, bigoted, hate-group stuff,
filled with paranoia; bomb recipes; how to engage in various kinds of
crimes, electronic and otherwise; scams and swindles. It's all there.
It's all available." Older students may be sophisticated enough to
separate the Net's good food from its poisons, but even the savvy can
be misled. On almost any subject the Net offers a plethora of
seemingly sound "research." But under close inspection much of it
proves to be ill informed, or just superficial. "That's the antithesis
of what classroom kids should be exposed to," Kerr said.
This makes traditionalists emphasize the enduring value of printed
books, vetted as most are by editing. In many schools, however,
libraries are fairly limited. I now volunteer at a San Francisco high
school where the library shelves are so bare that I can see how the
Internet's ever-growing number of research documents, with all their
shortcomings, can sometimes be a blessing.
Even computer enthusiasts give the Net tepid reviews. "Most of the
content on the Net is total garbage," Esther Dyson acknowledges. "But
if you find one good thing you can use it a million times." Kerr
believes that Dyson is being unrealistic. "If you find a useful site
one day, it may not be there the next day, or the information is
different. Teachers are being asked to jump in and figure out if what
they find on the Net is worthwhile. They don't have the skill or time
to do that." Especially when students rely on the Internet's
much-vaunted search software. Although these tools deliver hundreds or
thousands of sources within seconds, students may not realize that
search engines, and the Net itself, miss important information all the
time.
"We need less surfing in the schools, not more," David Gelernter, a
professor of computer science at Yale, wrote last year in The Weekly
Standard. "Couldn't we teach them to use what they've got before
favoring them with three orders of magnitude more?" In my
conversations with Larry Cuban, of Stanford, he argued, "Schooling is
not about information. It's getting kids to think about information.
It's about understanding and knowledge and wisdom."
It may be that youngsters' growing fascination with the Internet and
other ways to use computers will distract from yet another of
Clinton's education priorities: to build up the reading skills of
American children. Sherry Dingman, an assistant professor of
psychology at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, who is
optimistic about many computer applications, believes that if children
start using computers before they have a broad foundation in reading
from books, they will be cheated out of opportunities to develop
imagination. "If we think we're going to take kids who haven't been
read to, and fix it by sitting them in front of a computer, we're
fooling ourselves," Dingman told me not long ago. This doesn't mean
that teachers or parents should resort to books on CD-ROM, which
Dingman considers "a great waste of time," stuffing children's minds
with "canned" images instead of stimulating youngsters to create their
own. "Computers are lollipops that rot your teeth" is how Marilyn
Darch, an English teacher at Poly High School, in Long Beach,
California, put it in Silicon Snake Oil. "The kids love them. But once
they get hooked.... It makes reading a book seem tedious. Books don't
have sound effects, and their brains have to do all the work."
Computer advocates like to point out that the Internet allows for all
kinds of intellectual challenges -- especially when students use
E-mail, or post notes in "newsgroup" discussions, to correspond with
accomplished experts. Such experts, however, aren't consistently
available. When they are, online "conversations" generally take place
when correspondents are sitting alone, and the dialogue lacks the
unpredictability and richness that occur in face-to-face discussions.
In fact, when youngsters are put into groups for the "collaborative"
learning that computer defenders celebrate, realistically only one
child sits at the keyboard at a time. (During my school visits
children tended to get quite possessive about the mouse and the
keyboard, resulting in frustration and noisy disputes more often than
collaboration.) In combination these constraints lead to yet another
of the childhood developmentalists' concerns -- that computers
encourage social isolation.
Just a Glamorous Tool
I T would be easy to characterize the battle over computers as merely
another chapter in the world's oldest story: humanity's natural
resistance to change. But that does an injustice to the forces at work
in this transformation. This is not just the future versus the past,
uncertainty versus nostalgia; it is about encouraging a fundamental
shift in personal priorities -- a minimizing of the real, physical
world in favor of an unreal "virtual" world. It is about teaching
youngsters that exploring what's on a two-dimensional screen is more
important than playing with real objects, or sitting down to an
attentive conversation with a friend, a parent, or a teacher. By
extension, it means downplaying the importance of conversation, of
careful listening, and of expressing oneself in person with acuity and
individuality. In the process, it may also limit the development of
children's imaginations.
Perhaps this is why Steven Jobs, one of the founders of Apple Computer
and a man who claims to have "spearheaded giving away more computer
equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet," has come to a
grim conclusion: "What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with
technology," he told Wired magazine last year. "No amount of
technology will make a dent.... You're not going to solve the problems
by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every
school -- none of this is bad. It's bad only if it lulls us into
thinking we're doing something to solve the problem with education."
Jane David, the consultant to Apple, concurs, with a commonly heard
caveat. "There are real dangers," she told me, "in looking to
technology to be the savior of education. But it won't survive without
the technology."
Arguments like David's remind Clifford Stoll of yesteryear's promises
about television. He wrote in Silicon Snake Oil,
"Sesame Street"... has been around for twenty years. Indeed, its
idea of making learning relevant to all was as widely promoted in
the seventies as the Internet is today.
So where's that demographic wave of creative and brilliant students
now entering college? Did kids really need to learn how to watch
television? Did we inflate their expectations that learning would
always be colorful and fun?
Computer enthusiasts insist that the computer's "interactivity" and
multimedia features make this machine far superior to television.
Nonetheless, Stoll wrote,
I see a parallel between the goals of "Sesame Street" and those of
children's computing. Both are pervasive, expensive and encourage
children to sit still. Both display animated cartoons, gaudy
numbers and weird, random noises.... Both give the sensation that
by merely watching a screen, you can acquire information without
work and without discipline.
As the technology critic Neil Postman put it to a Harvard
electronic-media conference, "I thought that television would be the
last great technology that people would go into with their eyes
closed. Now you have the computer."
The solution is not to ban computers from classrooms altogether. But
it may be to ban federal spending on what is fast becoming an
overheated campaign. After all, the private sector, with its constant
supply of used computers and the computer industry's vigorous
competition for new customers, seems well equipped to handle the
situation. In fact, if schools can impose some limits -- on technology
donors and on themselves -- rather than indulging in a consumer
frenzy, most will probably find themselves with more electronic gear
than they need. That could free the billions that Clinton wants to
devote to technology and make it available for impoverished
fundamentals: teaching solid skills in reading, thinking, listening,
and talking; organizing inventive field trips and other rich hands-on
experiences; and, of course, building up the nation's core of
knowledgeable, inspiring teachers. These notions are considerably less
glamorous than computers are, but their worth is firmly proved through
a long history.
Last fall, after the school administrators in Mansfield,
Massachusetts, had eliminated proposed art, music, and
physical-education positions in favor of buying computers, Michael
Bellino, an electrical engineer at Boston University's Center for
Space Physics, appeared before the Massachusetts Board of Education to
protest. "The purpose of the schools [is] to, as one teacher argues,
'Teach carpentry, not hammer,'" he testified. "We need to teach the
whys and ways of the world. Tools come and tools go. Teaching our
children tools limits their knowledge to these tools and hence limits
their futures."
Illustrations by Mark Fredrickson
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; July 1997; The Computer Delusion; Volume 280,
No. 1; pages 45-62.
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