From: stevet@ora.com (Steve Talbott)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 14:56:33 EDT
Reply-To: netfuture@amber.ora.com

                                NETFUTURE

                   Technology and Human Responsibility

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Issue #52       Copyright 1997 Bridge Communications          July 2, 1997
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
                       Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott

 NETFUTURE on the Web:  http://www.ora.com/people/staff/stevet/netfuture/
. . .

Wiring Our Schools: Here Comes the Backlash
-------------------------------------------

I suggested several months back that "1997 is very likely to see the first
high-profile, tempest-causing note of sanity sounded against the cooption
of primary and secondary education by the costs, the time drain, and the
general irrelevance of computerized technology.  Before long *someone* is
going to step forward with an unexpected word of common sense."

In fact, many will do so, it's begun, and the storm's preliminary breezes
are already kicking up dust.

You may have seen the cover article in the July *Atlantic Monthly*.
Written by Todd Oppenheimer, it's called "The Computer Delusion," and is
prefaced with these words:

   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.

You may also have seen the little item from Edupage, drawn from the
*Washington Times* (June 24), which sounded like it was taken verbatim
from Lowell Monke's NETFUTURE pieces:

   BUY IT AND THEY WILL LEARN
   More than 2,800 pieces of classroom computers, printers or terminals
   are broken or neglected in Fairfax County (VA) public schools.  A
   school official says:  "The focus of attention was on buying the
   equipment, and the support of that equipment was not taken into
   account.  It was assumed the current support systems would be able to
   handle things and that has not proven to be the case."  The school
   board's budget panel chief says the board's decision not to hire
   additional technicians for this fiscal year was influenced by its
   budget policy to hire administrators only when absolutely necessary.

I've mentioned previously (NF #42) the high-profile conference scheduled
for September at Penn State: "Education and Technology -- Asking the Right
Questions."  Another equally important event, about which I expect to have
an announcement soon, will be held in December at Teachers College,
Columbia University.  These conferences will bring what is, to date,
unprecedented critical firepower to bear upon the reigning mania.  Given
the first substantial notice of the problems by the mainstream press, and
given the press's herd instinct for periodic (and profitable) reversals of
direction, I expect these conferences will provoke a lot of coverage and
controversy.

Perhaps most important of all, there is reality.  One gets the feeling in
talking to at least some educators that they simply cannot restrain their
questions any longer, no matter how stifling the surrounding bandwagon
mentality.  As one school principal recently remarked to me, "I don't want
to sound like a Luddite to my board, but we've *got* to slow down long
enough to figure out where these computers really belong in the education
of the child."

And if the backlash is intense, what then?  That's almost the only
question worth asking, and I don't see a lot of ground for optimism.  As a
society we've been complaining about television for many years -- we moan
and groan about it to the point of tedium -- and yet television's
penetration of society, its redefinition of politics, entertainment and
culture, continues unabated.

Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, the computer companies, the telephone
companies, charitable foundations -- all will continue making gifts to
schools of hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and software.  Who
will turn them down?  Governments will not have the insight or the guts to
change the course they've already set.  And perhaps most perniciously:
the drive to computerize education is the most convenient distraction
imaginable from the persistent shortcomings of the educational process
itself.  These shortcomings were provoking a sense of national crisis just
before the networked computer burst on the scene a few years ago; now that
crisis has been forgotten as we indulge our recurrent wish that the right
technology will kiss us and make everything okay.

In the end, I don't know any other answer than to let families choose
their schools in full freedom.  We will then see, via a massive and tragic
experiment, whether the attempt to cultivate nine-year-old geeks is
preferable to the restoration of art, music, and shop classes, the pursuit
of a hands-on science of the real world, and a wisely guided experience of
the "classroom village."

. . .