Now name three teachers who have profoundly influenced your life. Yesterday's filmstrip morphed into today's school computer. Promoted as a solution to the crisis in the classroom, computers have been welcomed uncritically across the educational spectrum. President Clinton promotes wiring the nation's high schools. Elementary schools seek grants for hardware and software.
Colleges invest in distance learning.
Yet the value of these expensive gizmos to the classroom is unproven and rests upon dubious assumptions. A good teacher interacting with motivated students. Anything that separates them filmstrips, instructional videos, multimedia displays, networked e-mail, television sets, or interactive computers is of dubious educational value. Yes, kids love these high-tech devices, and happily play with them for hours. But just because a child does something willingly doesn't mean that it engages her mind.