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Technology In Primary Education, Boon Or Bane?
code_rage writes "This article in the San Francisco Chronicle attacks the zealous use of computers in grade school. In a time of teacher layoffs, San Francisco schools are buying 450 new computers with federal and state grants. The effects on education go beyond the initial costs: educational methods are suffering, as children are learning PowerPoint and teachers are becoming unpaid SysAdmins and content censors. This article is a well-written and brief update to Cliff Stoll's book High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom." Update: 12/01 00:40 GMT by T : Ooops II-- "Classroom" is now correctly spelled.
What I think is going on is that we've got all these funds for technology/connectivity for schools, thanks to a bunch of wasteful spending by the Democrats, and we don't have the funding for teachers or books because they're not the latest or greatest thing. Oh, and they don't benefit big business either.
My recommendation is to curtail this sort of thing in your own community unless there is a clear plan for the actual implementation of all this technology. There rarely is. 'Training' is another area that seems to be minimally effective...
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I'd love to have a kind of computer 450 of which cost just short of 1M$ -- that would be almost 2K$/computer.
They're probably Macintoshes. Apple probably lobbied the school district vigorously.
Higher teacher salaries in public schools would do exactly nothing more than making the same type of lousy teachers take more money home.
The reason most teachers are lousy isn't because teachers are poorly paid, it's because they refuse to fire incompetent teachers. As long as a teacher goes through the motions of teaching, and doesn't do anything inappropriate in the classroom, they're basically untouchable.
Only after the incompetents are removed (and this means at least three quarters of current teachers) should pay increases be considered. Most of the current ones only deserve babysitting pay ($2/hour and a snack from the fridge).
* The people who invented and commercialized that tv didn't have tv in their classrooms.
People in egypt who built pyramids did not have calculators, why would we need them now?
* The people who invented the computer didn't have computers in their classrooms.
Sir Isaac Newton did not have the theory of relativity and it wasnt taught in the classroom so why the hell do we need to teach people calculus today?
* The people who cured polio, mumps, rubella, diptheria, pertussis, tetanus, etc. didn't have computers in their classrooms.
In ancient Rome, we did not have chemistry or physics, the earth was flat and zeus was throwing lightning down on people. Why would we need to ever teach physics? They didnt have it and look what they built.
* The people who split the atom didn't have computers in their classrooms.
Yeah and I'm sure they would all wish computers didnt exist because it would make their job splitting atoms so much more challenging and fun.
* Shakespear, Milton, Dickens, Twain, Dostoyevski, Joyce, Capote, Hemmingway, etc., didn't have computers in their classrooms.
Some of them didnt have pencils and used a quil. Would you like to go back to the 1700-1800s? If you don't want to go back in time please shut up. Computers make learning calculus alot easier, it makes learning how to read and write much easier when you can spell check at a button click without having to look through a dictionary to check every word you think you may have mispelled.
Theres an increase in productivity with computers, if you cannot see this then I suggest you move to communist china where you can live in a backwards society in which everyone works 12 hours a day for a penny an hour.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
SysAdmins
So, the systems are running linux and/or unix variants? I didn't think so. So why use this UNIX/Linux-specific administrator terminology? Windows Administrators aren't sysadmins, they're Windows Administrators.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
You have obviously been brainwashed by the liberals who are too blind to see that the answer to all our problems is more guns.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!