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EdTech Funding Cut from Proposed FY06 budget
An anonymous reader writes "Bush's proposed FY06 budget eliminates a $500M Enhancing Education Through Technology program that is a major component of many schools' tech budgets. Rural school districts that serve underprivileged populations are going to be especially hard-hit, since they rely so heavily on technology to use educational resources that would otherwise be unavailable."
Well, I sorta agree on your somewhat agreement. Or at least I would if there were any plan at all to help out schools without resoruces to have libraries and to attract highly qualified teachers. But there's not.
A computer lab with an Internet connection can serve to supplement the libraries of these schools.
It isn't that computer skills are going to be important to today's K-6 kids; they'll be using telepathic interfaces or something like that by the time they enter the work force. But kids in poor school districts will have accumulated decades of deficit in terms of access to information. We'll have created a third world underclass in our own country.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Here's a radical idea; how about making sure that kids can handle pencil-and-paper science and mathematics before we throw computers at them?
And let's be honest...short of some vocation training (typing, basic word processor-spreadsheet usage), what will kids use computers for that they can't get with books and a live teacher?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
(Not to mention the fact that every one of the schools that has implemented a "high technology" plan is committed to spending obscene amounts of money on Microsoft licenses for the next 15 years.)
How about we try teaching kids facts and thinking skills? Wouldn't that be something?
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.