Kids and Computers

A new study finds computers have become a fixture in many kid's lives at an unbelievable pace -- 72 percent of U.S. households with kids now have computers, many times the number five years ago. But the study by the Packard Foundation also finds an outrageous gap in computers and Net access between rich and poor kids at home and in schools, an issue that has so far failed to arouse campus activists, the tech industry, or President Bush, who outlined his educational initiatives this week without once even mentioning computers or technology. The study also has new stats on kids and computer use by age and activity. (Read more).

Nothing is more mysterious in politics than why some issues capture the imagination of idealistic people like college students -- sweatshops in Latin America, for example -- and some don't, like the enormous gap in computer use and Net access between poor and rich kids.

It's tough to imagine a more urgent moral issue than the fate of children without access to computers or the Net, since their educational, economic, cultural and social lives will be directly affected. Wealthier kids have access to research, free music, challenging games, educational and social opportunities online and the better jobs of the new economy. Poorer kids may be slinging burgers.

But the issue just doesn't seem to catch fire, either on college campuses, in the political community, among the sometimes narcisstic communities of tech workers, or among the intensely policitized communities and corners of cyberspace, where individual civil liberties are a raging concern but the technological fugures of other people often aren't. That's an ugly shame.

This week, a report by the David and Lucile Packard foundation issued this week but not yet online, revealed that computers are being used more than ever by kids who have them. An amazing seventy per cent of American households with children ages 2 to 17 have Net access, says the report, up from only 15 percent five years ago. About 20 percent of kids age 8 to 16 have computers in their bedrooms and ll per cess access the Net there.

It also revealed children's access to computers and the Net varies wildly with family income. A little more than 22 per cent of children in families with annual incomes of less than $20,000 had access to a home computer, compared with 91 percent of those in families with incomes of more than $75,000. Even in those cases where they do have a computer, found the study, kids in lower-income families use it less, in part because their families are less likely to have an ISP. And they almost never have access to broadband, beyond limited time on school and library computers.

This isn't a small disparity. Access to computing -- to RPG and other forms of gaming, search engines, IM, file-sharing systems -- shapes creativity, vocabuliary, political awareness, culture and common language, not to mention economic opportunity.

According to a story by Tamar Lewin in the New York Times this week, almost every school in the nation is now wired, but there are enormous differences in how indvidual schools use computers. The Packard Foundation report, which includes studies by a number of other experts, found that schools serving poorer kids are more likely to emphasize word processing and other simple tasks while those serving more affluent students taught computing as a means of promoting cognitive skills, problem-solving and gathering information on specialized fields of study.

The report also found that computers are turning out to be especially effective in dealing with some learning disabilities, a valuable treatment that poorer kids are also deprived of.

The report had some other interesting findings, some surprising, some not:

• For young boys, games are the dominant form of computer use. And there is little evidence that moderate game playing affect's kids social relationships or friendships.
• There are concerns among educators and psychologists about the 7 to 9 percent of American children who play computer games for more than 30 hours a week.
• Teenagers use IM, e-mail and chat rooms as a primary means of staying in touch with friends.
• Children ages 2 to 5 averaged 27 minutes a day at the computer. Children 6 to 11 spend 49 minutes a day. Kids 12 to 17 averaged 63 minutes a day.

Not surprisingly, the more technology is available in the home, the more time kids spend in front of screens. The Packard Foundation report cited a l999 survey which found that children ages 2 to 17 who had computers video games and a TV spent on average 4 hours and 48 minutes a day in front of some type of screen, as compared with 3 hours and 40 minutes for kids who didn't have computers or videogame equipment.

Among the recommendations the study's authors make is this: "Efforts to ensure equal access to computer-related learning opportunities at school must move beyond a concern with the number of computers in different schools toward an emphasis on how well those computers are being used to help children develop intellectual competencies and technical skills," said the Packard Foundation study.

That means equal access issues involve more than software and hardware. It involves getting kids to the next level, using computing and the Net to develop story-telling, creativity, IQ, research and communicative skills, something that's only happening, the report says, in more affluent schools.

And there's no reason to expect this disparity to narrow. Computer companies have shown little intererest in getting equipment into the hands of poorer kids and families, even though it wouldn't be enormously expensive (an AT&T study a couple of years estimated it would cost between $3 and $5 billion) and would yield enormous economic benefits down the road.

The Clinton administration talked about equal access, but never fought for funding for it. Congressional Republicans showed little interest in the issue. Bush says he wants education to be a major priority in his administration, but his proposals, which were outlined this week, focus on literacy testing and accountability -- they don't even mention technology or computing. Few people in the new or old administration -- or anywhere else, for that matter -- seems to get that the most powerful moral issue affecting many kids and the Net isn't that they are online too much, but that so many aren't online at all, or find their Net and Web lives bounded by disparities in family income.

Comments

Well given his record on education in Texas...

[RJ11]

While governor of Texas, he oversaw legislation to make all text books censored and specially written to the state's specifications. Which is no wonder why they have text books that depict world maps where the equator passes through the southern part of the US.

Given this, I don't think technology in education will be one of Bush's main priorities (nor would I want it to be, given what he might do to it).

Better Ways to spend the money

[Cire]

Jon,

The issue doesn't get people fired up for a few simple reasons.

It's simply more important to get more books and new copies of books into kids hands than it is to get them new computers. It's also much cheaper to buy a book (or a dozen books or even a hundred books!) than it is to buy one computer!

It's also more important to spend the money on qualified teachers. Getting more teachers with more experience and better qualifications at the head of classrooms with smaller class sizes than it is to put net access infront of kids faces.

It's more important to spend that money on field trips. Do you think kids want to look at web pages about dinosaurs or they want to go to the American Museum of Natural History and see the fossils for themselves!

And honestly, if you sit and 8th grade boy infront of a computer, do you think he's a) going to sit there and look at what the teacher wants him to look at or b) he's going to spend his time trying to find ways to get to the WWF website when the teacher's not looking.

Cire

Try Harder

[Golias]

"It's tough to imagine a more urgent moral issue than the fate of children without access to computers or the Net, since their educational, economic, cultural and social lives will be directly affected." Let's see...

Many inner city schools are failing to even provide a basic level of literacy, let alone properly prepare students for advanced education.

While in four black men are going to prison, drug laws jail crack users longer than powdered cocaine users. (The only real difference between rocks and poweder: powder is the popular choice of white addicts, while the rocks are mostly used by blacks.)

Roughly one in five prgnancies in America are terminated, most of which are abortions of convenience, many of the women having these abortions are having more than one. Pro-choice or not, this should offend your sensibilies from a moral perspective.

Women in many Arabic and eastern nations are still treated like property.

That was just the first few things I could think of off the top of my head that are more "urgent moral issues" than kids that can't access Slashdot. Try to keep things in perspective, Jon.

The solution to this problem is easy.

Cost of a 3-year-old computer: damn near zero.
Cost of using one of several ad-driven ISP's: absolutely zero.

Poor kids can't afford to play Everquest on a P4 with a 20" monitor and a broadband connection, but any kid that has power and a phone line can scrape together the cash to get on the net with a cheap Linux box and an old modem.