Jonathan Zimmerman: Should Schools be Giving Out Computers?
[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory." He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.]
...According to a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 36 percent of American children between the ages of 8 and 18 have a computer in their bedroom. The rest have to go elsewhere in the house - or outside the house - to get on the Internet.
With school-issued computers, however, they won't have to. And millions of kids are getting them. In 2006, a study of the nation's 2,500 largest school districts found that one-quarter of them provided "one-to-one computing," as student-laptop programs are called. Fully half of the districts expected to have such a program in place by 2011....
Why? Laptop programs reflect a long tradition of gee-whiz technological enthusiasm in American education. To fix the schools, the argument goes, find a new gadget. This notion's most famous proponent was Thomas Edison, who helped invent motion pictures and also started a company to market them in the schools.
"I believe the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system," Edison predicted in 1922, "and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks."
In the 1930s, observers made the same claims for radio; in the '50s, for television. And today we invoke computers as the latest technological savior of our educational system.
Of course, nothing can save education - save the people who actually deliver it: teachers. But Americans don't trust them. Indeed, the constant search for the next technological fix shows how little faith we place in classroom teachers.
And our young people are listening. Over the past four decades, as my New York University colleague Sean Corcoran has shown, a declining share of the most talented college graduates have chosen to enter the teaching profession.
There's only one way to reverse that trend: Raise teachers' starting pay to make the field more attractive to the best students. That would be expensive, and it wouldn't show results overnight. But if we're truly serious about transf
Read entire article at Philadelphia Inquirer
...According to a recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 36 percent of American children between the ages of 8 and 18 have a computer in their bedroom. The rest have to go elsewhere in the house - or outside the house - to get on the Internet.
With school-issued computers, however, they won't have to. And millions of kids are getting them. In 2006, a study of the nation's 2,500 largest school districts found that one-quarter of them provided "one-to-one computing," as student-laptop programs are called. Fully half of the districts expected to have such a program in place by 2011....
Why? Laptop programs reflect a long tradition of gee-whiz technological enthusiasm in American education. To fix the schools, the argument goes, find a new gadget. This notion's most famous proponent was Thomas Edison, who helped invent motion pictures and also started a company to market them in the schools.
"I believe the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system," Edison predicted in 1922, "and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks."
In the 1930s, observers made the same claims for radio; in the '50s, for television. And today we invoke computers as the latest technological savior of our educational system.
Of course, nothing can save education - save the people who actually deliver it: teachers. But Americans don't trust them. Indeed, the constant search for the next technological fix shows how little faith we place in classroom teachers.
And our young people are listening. Over the past four decades, as my New York University colleague Sean Corcoran has shown, a declining share of the most talented college graduates have chosen to enter the teaching profession.
There's only one way to reverse that trend: Raise teachers' starting pay to make the field more attractive to the best students. That would be expensive, and it wouldn't show results overnight. But if we're truly serious about transf