Professor Schaff, has a bee in his bonnet about laptops in public schools. It is not a large bee or a particularly aggressive African sort of bee, but it does buzz around rather frequently. While I agree with a lot of things that my colleague says, I still think the policy of providing schools and hopefully students with computers is a good one.
He is right about one thing: giving computers to students will do little or nothing in itself to improve their performance in education. It is possible that it does some small measure of harm, in so far as it adds to the distractions that they are exposed to. But keeping them isolated from the world network would be too high a price to pay to avoid those distractions.
One of the things that education up through high school needs to do is teach certain basic skills. In addition to the most obvious-reading, writing, arithmetic, etc.-some of those skills are technological. I learned to type in a home economics course in eighth grade. It is hard to think of a basic skill (after reading and writing) that had more impact on my subsequent education. I think that this is the right analogy for teaching basic computer skills to young students. A student whose household has no desktop or internet connection will depend on libraries (which he or she may never visit) and the school house. Otherwise the student remains isolated from the world net, where most public conversations are happening. Isolation has always been the greatest obstacle to education.
I certainly agree with my colleague that an education in classics is the foundation of the most developed mind. Some time ago a student achieved one of the highest scores on the SAT exam after she prepared by reading the Norton Anthology of English Literature all the way through, twice. The classics teach you how to think about whatever you happen to confront or become curious about. But these days, a household without an internet connection probably doesn't have a copy of the Norton Anthology either.
Moreover, the internet offers resources to a student that I, as a graduate student in political philosophy, could only dream about. Consider, for example, the Blue Letter Bible site. Using that site, one can look up any passage in the Old or New Testament, and see the original Hebrew or Greek. Now it would be a wonderful thing if we taught our high school freshmen either or both of these ancient languages, and to be sure no translation software is any substitute for mastering the language. But the Blue Letter Bible site allows the reader to look up any word in the Bible, and consider the range of ancient meanings. The student can find out, for example, that the word spirit in Genesis 1:2 is originally the word for breath. He can learn that the word for gentiles in Romans means nations or tribes and the student may recognize that the Greek word is the basis for the modern word "ethnic". There is a lot to chew on there.
Professor Schaff's hero out of Evelyn Waugh, Mr. Scott-King, says this:
"If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world."
I suspect that Mr. S-K could do a lot with the Blue Letter Bible to make sure that his students are not fit for the modern world.
Recent Comments