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Laptops in Every Backpack
Scott Sawyer writes: "Check out Wired to see that Maine is going to put a laptop in every 7th graders school bag. I remember when we had to go to another room to work on the Tandy, TRS-80's." We did a story about Laptops in Education a few months ago that had more information about this Maine proposal that's now a reality.
It's the ultimate "dog bites man" story. Let's see: Americans are insanely mobile, and yet the country has no national curriculum, so children who move have gaps in what they've learned. Any attempts to write even a skeleton for a national curriculum gets shot down by politics. By the time kids enter kindergarten, they have been driven by television to have the attention span of a horny weasel, making discipline difficult, ever more so because every class will have two or more problem kids who cannot be disciplined without a confrontation with their parents. Another two or more will have been so neglected that the teacher will have to show them how to tie their shoes, use silverware, and sometimes how to brush their teeth. Separating problem children for the benefit of normal kids is too tied up in legalities, so it just doesn't happen. Wellcome to the circus. But hold, there's more.
Teaching doesn't pay well. So few people enter it. Many of these come from the bottom of the collegiate barrel. Ed-school is a joke. Teacher unions worsen the problem by fighting against any attempt to tighten merit requirements in the hiring, tenuring, promotion, or firing of teachers. The only surefire way to fire a teacher is to lay an accusation of pedophilia. In ed-school, teachers learn methods based on the ideology of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his heirs, which is largely counterproductive. Ironically, ed-schools continue to represent Rousseau's ideas as grand innovation. So the classroom is a lunatic asylum, and the teachers can often be counted among the patients.
First grade reading is hardest hit by ed-school methods, making for a piss-poor start. The impact of "whole-language" teaching has a negative effect on the entire 12 year system. Yet ed-schools stick to these methods because ed-schools are a cult, not a branch of academia. As students progress through the system, they are hit by popular culture and its pernicious influence against making any effort longer than thirty minutes. This same monstrosity also helps create the school clique system, which by high school comes to resemble wartime Beirut, minus the firearms.
And the solution, says the state of Maine, is to give them all laptops. And people wonder why I am renewing my green card, but not filing for naturalization...
A lot of people are being left behind in the computer age because they are old and thus find it hard to learn an entire new vocabulary for dealing with computers. But that is not the problem kids have. Age 18 is not too old to catch this wave. Kids have other disadvantages in need of redress: if they can't write clearly, they come off as idiots in email. If they can't read, they're toast. If they don't have a good base of general knowledge and a good grasp on highbrow (i.e. technical or literate) English, they're toast. Laptops don't solve any of these problems, which means laptops don't close the real digital divide.