No-Tech Schools In Tech Land

manyoso writes: "This article in the Oregonian tells how some hi-tech parents at Intel are opting for a school without computers for their children. From the article: 'Conventional wisdom holds that children can only benefit from exposure to technology', but children, 'shouldn't spend first-grade skipping coloring and learning to keyboard... Emphasizing computers doesn't seem to enhance students' creativity and could even stifle it... We want them to eventually see what a computer can do for them, but only after they know what they can do for themselves.'" Clifford Stoll has argued and written along similar lines.

Comments

One hypothesis

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First, I believe in the right of parents to educate their children the way they see fit, so long as they get educated. This is true be that with computers, without computers, with schools, without schools, what have you.

I think that this has less to do with the benefits or lack thereof associated with exposure to technlogy. It has more to do with the fact that the masses, the hoi polloi, the little people, all pretty much have access to computers, earlier, thanks to well meaning social activism and government and corporate largess.

As with similar mass-market technologies that have gone before it, including radio, television, the Internet started out as a tool and toy for the creme de la creme, the elite, the upper crust. Once the newness wore off and the fact that it wasn't the hope for the transformation of the world for the better, the elites abandoned it to the lower classes. We can readily observe this phenomenon with regard to television. Not many of the intellectual class will admit to watching Friends among their equals (though I imagine many indulge occasionally as a guilty pleasure).

The Intel engineers, as members of a relatively high social and intellectual class, apparently think computers and the Internet sufficiently droll that they do not wish their offspring to risk their potential mentally stunting effects for the chance of unproven educational benefit.