I'm not dogmatic in my resistance here. In fact, I'm always looking for evidence of success. Last summer I visited a wonderful place, The Ross School , on Long Island, New York. It's an independent K-12 school that's fortunate to have a wealth of resources, including the most sophisticated computing hardware I've ever seen in any educational institution. The place is bursting with servers and computerized classrooms, circular classrooms with multi-screen projection.
Students can bring their laptops and display pictures for one another about the topic of the day.
But what interested me about the school was not its computing power, but the fact that the curriculum focuses on cultural history. Knowledge from all the world's cultures from prehistory to the present day are presented to students as a way of learning art, science, mathematics, philosophy and religion. The curriculum was designed by the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, a brilliant scholar who has studied the sources of human insight and inspiration from around the globe and throughout the millennia. Following his study plans, students at the school receive an amazingly rich, multi-faceted experience. Much of it is hands-on rather than flat tube.