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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
CLINTON'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.
Artificial
Experience
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"
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
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
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
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
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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