Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

Computers Won't Make You Smart
The "Digital Divide" And Education

Not long ago, the Liverpool school district proposed making laptops mandatory for high school students. Liverpool is the suburb of Syracuse in which I live, and it is generally regarded as "affluent." Much to the surprise of the pointy-headed twits on the Liverpool School board, the outcry from Liverpool parents (and even students) was so severe that they were forced to implement a scaled-back, voluntary program instead.

Let us dismiss the fact that laptops are among the least ergonomic computer devices, from their small keyboards to their annoying little LCD monitors. Let us also disregard the utter and contemptible arrogance of a school board that would simply demand that parents spend upwards of 1000 dollars at the behest and whim of school board politicians. Laptops in schools are becoming increasingly common. At the very least, the number of education bureaucrats begging for their insertion into school curricula is increasing at an alarming rate.

The benefits of computers are seldom questioned. School districts annually spend thousands or even millions of dollars on computer hardware that will be obsolete inside of two years (at the most). The rationale for this expense is the concept that the computers are good for students; the unspoken justification is that computers somehow magically make your children smart.

They don't. Children in the United States are doing worse with each passing semester, and every year we are told that our students rank somewhere behind Outer Gambia but just ahead of Elbonia in math and reading scores. Educators and education bureaucrats seem to think that our problem is financial; if we would just spend enough money on our schools, if we just throw more dollars on the bonfire of public education, we could spend our way towards smart children. The magic box of the computer is too sparkly a bauble to resist; we must have computer labs stocked with the latest technology, our educators say, and this will help our children to do better.

The result is grade after grade of students who know how to use a computer -- and who use those machines to create web pages full of misspelled and generally botched English. Not long ago I read an article that a New York State Regents math exam might have to be readministered, because calculators distributed to students at the beginning of the test were later found to be malfunctioning. Excuse me? Calculators in a math exam? Students too math-ignorant to notice that the calculators weren't functioning while they took the test? This is not a failure of finances. It is a failure of curricula.

The skills that will serve you best through life are not computer-literacy (though of course this is important) but the ability to perform arithmetic and the ability to express yourself. Articulate individuals who understand mathematics will be able to learn anything you put in front of them, and once they learn it, their output will far exceed that of students who cannot write or even speak properly, who do not know that a calculator stating "2+2=4.4" is malfunctioning. Students need to learn basic geography, consumer mathematics, proper spelling and grammar, accurate accounts of history, even weights and measures -- all things that I feel were lacking in my public school education, to say nothing of education today.

I am not against computers, but no student in today's technologically driven world is in danger of growing up computer illiterate. Many public libraries have computers, as do over half of all households in the United States. A student who graduates high school having never used a computer either doesn't want to or lives in a snow cave in the Arctic Circle. Computer literacy, and the ability to use computer programs that make one marketable for one's chosen employment area, are tools that, at most, should be taught in college. They certainly should not be the focus of high school, junior high, and even elementary school educations.

I've saved the harshest point for last. Many people who occupy the "digital divide" -- that segment of poor, noble citizens who would very much like to use a computer if only they could afford one -- are too stupid or too shiftless to use one.

Find yourself a librarian who works in a library with public internet and computer access. If that library is anywhere but in an affluent suburb, the librarian will tell you that publicly available computer terminals are used overwhelmingly to access chat rooms and pornography. They'll go on to tell you that hardware is abused and sometimes even stolen, and that in no way has access to computers improved the education of those users. While there are poor or otherwise uneducated people who want and need a computer for constructive purposes, they are far outnumbered by those who treat the machine as a toy, and access to it as an entitlement.

Computers will not make our children smart. Our schools must learn to do more with less, and the only way to do that is to change the focus of public school curricula. Fail to do this, and voter support for private school vouchers will become so overwhelming that politicians will be forced to approve it, and the already struggling public school system will collapse under the weight of its own ignorance.

Some people don't deserve access to a computer. Everyone else finds a way. And in all cases, real education must come before technology.