The Atlantic Monthly July 1997
THE COMPUTER DELUSION
by Todd Oppenheimer
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
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"
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
Consider 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"
Today'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
Newspaper 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.
