I’m a 20+ yr. I.T. veteran and a bona fide gadget hound but still, I question the validity of PCs in the classroom. There’s a startling lack of evidence that computers make any appreciable improvement in student achievement and worse yet, the committees that push the computers in the classroom agenda so hard are largely manned by representatives of tech companies & agencies that stand to benefit (richly!) from the added business. This is a classic - and very dangerous - case of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. We’re blindly allowing millions of dollars to be funneled into an unproven strategy that has some very questionable motives and no quantifiable benefit.

I urge you to read Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology from the Alliance for Childhood to explore this troubling issue further.

I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t have the opportunity to acquire computer-use skills in school, but we’ve got to move much more cautiously and mindfully towards that. Our current adoption of computers in education is reckless and shows little consideration for the long-term effects or specific goals.

We’d be far wiser to instead focus on teaching children how to be problem-solvers and organized, rational thinkers. Those are the skills, not MS Word or PowerPoint, that’ll serve them as they mature into the digital society.