Your Education Will Be Upgraded: Laptops, Part II

Ken Blanchard gives an alternative view of the use of laptops in school to counter my negative assessment.  A brief response.

Prof. Blanchard says I have a "bee in my bonnet," which is what one usually says when a person is irrationally perturbed over a small matter.  I assure our readers that on this matter my rationality is solidly intact. 

Prof. Blanchard makes a large concession to my view:

[Prof. Schaff] 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.

I am against spending large amounts of money for something that will at best do nothing and at worst produce even a "small measure of harm."  I say take that money and give it to the teachers. 

Prof. Blanchard's fundamental misunderstanding is that he confuses the issue of giving students a background in technology (I am for it) with giving every student a laptop and then creating a curriculum around the use of computers.  Prof. Blanchard assumes that one is keeping students "isolated from the world network" if we do not create a curriculum based around laptops.  A couple points.  First, I am not against teaching computer courses.  Like Prof. Blanchard I learned keyboarding in school (it was called Keyboarding and Word Processing).  But that is a far cry from making the use of computers central to the curriculum.  Second, Prof. Blanchard and I have plenty of students who do not own laptops.  Are they "isolated from the world network"?  I should think not.  To the extent they are, it can be cured by a one credit class in online data bases provided through our university library. No need to burden our students (or the taxpayers) with the expense of buying a laptop.   I take class time in American Government classes to show students how to look up various kinds of information online (for example, we look at both the House and Senate sites, as well as the sites the White House and various Executive Branch agencies).  Use of the online world can be taught as needed to supplement curriculum as opposed to creating a new curriculum around a piece of technology. 

Lastly, I'd ask Prof. Blanchard to consider what he knows about the eduction profession and then ask himself whether the ubiquity of laptops will be used to teach classics to students.  Again, I am not a Luddite.  I do not oppose technology in education.  So by all means use the Blue Letter Bible in class (although those teaching in public schools may face a lawsuit for accessing that particular data base). But I suspect that laptops will be used for trendy software that contain lots of bells and whistles and provide scads of visual and audio stimuli but do not really teach much.  "Interactive" learning will replace memorization, contemplation, imagination, and proficiency in the use of language.