I have become quite expert at giving brief answers to each kind of protest. The field is suffering from far too much of that. What is needed is to mobilize an intellectual community to give to this kind of problem the level of attention and resources currently reserved for efforts to bolster a traditional curriculum that is in any case condemned by history. Plain Language Public debate about computers and learning is mired in confusions that are greatly aggravated because these weaknesses in our internal intellectual culture inhibit us from working more energetically and effectively for public clarity. Without exception the hundred or so people with whom I discussed the main story, which was written by Todd Oppenheimer, interpreted it as evidence that computers don't improve learning.
Most schools use books badly and pianos badly and everything else badly.
It might have been a scandal. But it would have been a different scandal and would not have served the purposes of sensational journalism, which Atlantic's cover exploited to the full. As it is, the language of the debate constitutes intellectual pollution, not only because it leaves people muddled and confused about facts but especially because it encourages poor language usage and poor formulation of questions. I think we ought to jump on these authors for using language that encourages people to ask the wrong questions. Such confusions are not easy to neutralize, especially since powerful forces have an interest in the kind of confusion that breeds them.