These days we continue to get weak programming, but we also get more and more coverage of a kind that was not formerly available, such as all-day news channels, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel. My goal here is to discuss the effects technology may have on human intelligence, not just with levels of intelligence but also what intelligence is. I will discuss some stunningly positive effects but some distressingly negative effects as well. When I went to elementary and secondary school in the 1950s and 1960s, we did all our mathematical computations by hand, and only as high school seniors did we begin to use the now almost forgotten slide rule to help us in these computations. To succeed in mathematics a student had to be skilled in computation because no matter how strong he or she was in conceptual and problem-solving skills, a wrong computation could easily lead to wrong answers in problem solving, as on homework, a quiz, or a test.
Most schools are quite different today.
In several important senses, our children's informed use of calculators has increased their intelligence. First, the calculators have removed virtually all of the computational errors they once would have been likely to have made in their work. Just in terms of the answers they can produce, therefore, what was once a common source of error has been removed. In the past, they would have had to devote substantial mental resources to the adequate implementation of computational formulas. Much of the time they would have spent doing mathematics would therefore have been spent in fairly mindless computations.