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Is Early Childhood Education Technology Moving Backwards?
theodp writes "Four decades ago, the NSF-sponsored PLATO Elementary Reading Curriculum Project (pdf) provided Illinois schoolchildren with reading lessons and e-versions of beloved children's books that exploited networked, touch-sensitive 8.5"x8.5" bit-mapped plasma screens, color images, and audio. Last week, the Today Show promoted the TeacherMate — a $100 gadget that's teaching Illinois schoolchildren to read and do math using its 2.5" screen and old-school U-D-L-R cursor keys — as a revolution in education. Has early childhood education managed to defy Moore's Law?"
Now we plug them into X Interactivodular superintermodular digital box and have them staring at a generic "FUN!!1" learning program that teaches them to rotely memorize whatever miniscule number of factoids it can hold in it's tiny memory. Then we pick them up and shuttle them around all day on a million and one "Structured play-time" events before taking them home and expecting them to go to sleep on command after a hard day of sitting and doing what grownups tell them to.
We used to give them a stack of comic books, a box of legos, and enough kool-aid for them and whatever other kids in the neighborhood weren't grounded at the moment and tell them to figure it out for themselves.
Homework isn't (by default) fun, and "Structured play-time" is not good for kids. Learning is what you do so they're able to have options as an adult, and fun is anything they do voluntarily after they do the things they need to do but don't want to.
Let the little shiats skin their knees, scream their heads off, run around with their pants on their head, dig in the mud, and punch someone in their new best friend in the nose now and then. They'll thank you for it later.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
IAAKT (I Am A Kindergarten Teacher) and I would not say that I'm going backwards by having my students use crayons, pencils, markers instead of plasma, touch sensitive displays. Nor am I going backwards by using chalk and a blackboard instead of powerpoint and multimedia displays to teach your children how to read and write.
Sometimes I often wonder if people push technology on children for the sake of making themselves look good ("Look, I introduced a bunch of 6yr olds to powerpoint and the web!").
Btw: Chalk/pencils/paper never run out of batteries, never get badly damaged when dropped. Never need an "IT Guy" on staff to fix/train/repair/upgrade. Also, I spend quite a bit of my own money on school supplies for the students. It's much easier to go to walmart and buy a box of pencils than it is to go to the school board and ask them to appropriate more funding so we can have more ebook readers so that every child gets one.
Computers don't emit "smartness radiation."
Computers in the class room have been around at least 25 years. There was an Apple ][ in every classroom when I was a kid. We used it to die of dysentery on the Oregon Trail. Did we learn anything about history? No. We learned to that all that settlers needed was a 99 rounds of ammunition.
Computers in the classroom are just the latest incarnation of the whiz-bang technology that would magically make improve education and test scores, without requiring any more work on the child's, parent's, or teacher's part. Just like television, movies, and filmstrips were hailed as an educator's silver bullet generations before. (Stoll wrote about this 14 years ago, and it stills holds true.)
Anyone that has attended class in any "e-learning" classroom, can attest that of the regular occurrences of projectors that don't work. Video and audio links that fail. Overly sensitive microphones and the like. The amount of time wasted trying to just set things up before instruction can begin is non-trivial, and easily can accumulate to entire missed days of instruction. No thank you.
Watching passively, and just clicking "next" is not education. The reason why it's used for occupational training, is that because no one wants to acutally teach, nor learn. It's indemnification.
If you really want to improve education, how about removing the distractions, and actually teaching out of the book?
Assume the average age of the Apollo program engineers was 40 in 1969.
That means they were in elementary school in the late 30s and early 40s -- what kind of "technology" were they taught with? Chalk, pencils and books -- maybe even slide rules and a compass. And those guys figured out how to put men on the moon!
I do work with schools occasionally and am appalled at the money pissed away on worthless shit like smartboards and computers & software that go obsolete faster than the districts can implement them. And after that I hear the ridiculous appeals from administrators who claim they don't have enough money to fix broken windows, paint the walls or other basic maintenance, because they pissed it all away on technology that is useless in 4 years and literally junk in 8. I want to cry when they say they need to raise my taxes for it.
Technology probably has more of a place in junior and senior high schools, but even then at a fraction of the level they try to implement it at.
Computers are not open ended. Maybe it seems so to programmers (and programmers are limited by hardware, who are limited by applied physics/chemistry etc etc).
In may ways, paper is just as open ended.
The openness is also distorted by the commercial aspects of the company making the device. They effectively limit the openness by wanting to hit time-to-market dates and limit the complexity of design.
I doubt that the computer skills will be relevant - the technology moves on. No school predicted the requirement computers skills; and they will not predict the next skill needed by preschoolers.
The common skill you need is thinking and initiative.
I think you're misinterpreting the data a bit - the key difference is not public school vs. homeschool. The key difference is the dedicated parents who value education. It's the same reason why most private schools out-perform most public schools. Because homeschooled kids and private school kids have dedicated parents who care about education.
Public schools have to accept hordes of kids whose indifferent parents dump them there for free daycare. And those kids drag down the whole system.
-B-
He was proficient on the PC at 1. A week after his 2nd birthday he did his first Ubuntu install. (No, he couldn't read. Yes, it is really more an example of just how easy it is to install Linux.) He started reading just before three, and started working on electronics projects soon after. At 5, he is currently working on his multiplication, division, and improving his writing skills. He reads as well as many of the kids I went to high school with. ( Yes, that is as much a slight against the public school kids as it is bragging about my own.) When he wants to know something new, he has no problem getting on Google and finding it.
Get real. How the hell is one "proficient" on the PC at 1 if at 2 you're still unable to read? Anyone who can read and write minimally and push buttons can look something up on Google. If you're not careful, your delusions are going to be as detrimental as your coaching are going to be helpful. If your son is brilliant (and he may be), you've offered little in the way of proof. You have however proven you're probably not well equipped to judge his ability as you're way too biased.
Do you really want your child to be a genius? Do you have any idea how hard life is for a prodigy? Why would any parent wish that upon their child?
How much socialisation is he getting? What are his social skills going to be like when he's a little older? What about his ability to tolerate stupidity all around and still produce results? It takes a long time and practice to learn to get along with the other monkeys they share the planet with. Learning to put up with a teacher or classmates that don't like you, as well as learning to form friendships by making others feel good about themselves without a parent in arms reach to fall back on is important. Possibly just as important as academic skills if you want to have a happy life.
I have a 1 year old. Some days he does some very clever things. Other day's he does things that are so bone headed that i wonder how we managed to make it out of the trees. That's what a one year old does.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer