Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Public Education

381 A TLANTIC M ONTHLY ’ S J ULY 1997 ISSUE CARRIED THE ARTICLE “T HE C OMPUTER D ELUSION ” by Todd Oppenheimer. Excerpts follow: There is no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve teaching and learning, yet school districts are cutting programs—music, art, physical education—that enrich children’s lives to make room for this dubious nostrum, and the Clinton Adminis tration has embraced the goal of “computers in every classroom” with credulous and costly enthusiasm.... The noted psychologist B.F. Skinner, referring to the first days of his “teaching ma chines,” in the late 1950s and early 1960s wrote, “I was soon saying that, with the help of teaching machines and programmed instruction, students could learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as in a standard classroom.” Ten years after Skinner’s recollections were published, President Bill Clinton campaigned for a “bridge to the twenty first century... where computers are as much a part of the classroom as blackboards.” Clinton was not alone in his enthusiasm for a program estimated to cost somewhere between $40 billion and $100 billion over the next five years. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, talk ing about computers to the Republican National Committee early this year, said, “We could do so much to make education available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, that people could literally have a whole different attitude toward learning.”... In a poll taken early last year U.S. teachers ranked computer skills and media technology as more “essential” than the study of European history, biology, chemistry, and physics; than dealing with social problems such as drugs and family breakdown; than learning practical job skills; and than reading modern American writers such as Steinbeck and Hemingway or classic ones such as Plato and Shakespeare.... Interestingly, shop classes and field trips are two programs that the National information Infrastructure Advisory Council, the Clinton Administration’s technology task force, suggests reducing in order to shift resources into computers. But are these results what technology promoters really intend? “You need to apply common sense,” Esther Dyson, the president of EDventure Holdings and one of the task force’s leading school advocates, told me recently, “Shop with a good teacher probably is worth more than computers with a lousy teacher. But if it’s a poor program, this may provide a good excuse for cutting it. There will be a lot of trials and errors with this. And I don’t know how to prevent those errors.” 55 The issue, perhaps is the magnitude of the errors. Alan Lesgold, a professor of psychology and the associate director of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, calls the computer an “amplifier,” because it encourages both enlightened study practices and thoughtless ones. There’s a real risk, though, that the thoughtless practices will dominate, slowly dumbing down huge numbers of tomorrow’s adults. As Sherry Turkle, a professor of the sociology of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a longtime observer of children’s use of computers, told me, “The possibilities of using this thing poorly so outweigh the chance of using it well, it makes people like us, who are fundamentally optimistic about computers, very reticent.”... Clifford Stoll, the author of Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (1995), told The New York Times last year, recalling his own school days in the 1960s, “We loved them because we didn’t have to teach, and parents loved them because it showed their schools were high-tech. But no learning happened.”... Reading programs get particularly bad reviews. One small but carefully controlled study went so far as to claim that Reader Rabbit, a reading program now used in more than 100,000 schools, caused students to suffer a 50 percent drop in creativity. (Apparently, after forty-nine students used the program for seven months, they were no longer able to answer The Noxious Nineties : c. 1997