Adding laptops not only increases the very real financial burden on current families, but also makes Lakeside more exclusive and unattainable, preventing even more families from considering it in the first place. While the business of Lakeside will go on no matter what background the students come from, awareness of the existence of the middle class and the economic realities of life outside the upper classes was already absent from much of the student body while I was a student. This does not bode well for the future quality of Lakeside graduates. Even this unfortunate loss of diversity might be acceptable if, say, the remaining Lakeside students were going to be learning twice as well once they had laptops in hand. For all their 21st century appeal, laptops will not help students of history, English, Spanish, biology, physics, or calculus in any way that the more economical technology already in place at Lakeside cannot already achieve.
Laptops are inherently ill-suited for liberal arts classes.
Though I have many friends who own them, almost all prefer to take notes and revise papers by hand, and the same situation is apparently true at Dartmouth, which as I understand it currently requires laptops. Were all these problems to be resolved, this incredibly expensive tool would still fail to significantly enhance the actual learning process in liberal arts classes. Learning occurs in these courses when a student has absorbed the texts and intellectually engages the teacher and his peers in the broad arena of actual human discussion, not when he mechanically transcribes the class into his laptop. Even in technical classes, laptops will not add any utility beyond what the current classroom computers already provide. Taking math, physics, or chemistry notes is totally impossible on a keyboard.