Source: The Workbook, vol. 24, Summer 1999, pp. 52-3..
Reviewer: Dr. Moti Nissani
Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds—for Better and Worse
Jane M. Healy
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998
350 pp., US $25
Before delving into this remarkable book, let me quickly highlight its major flaws.
Failure to Connect lacks organization and coherence. Its central message must somehow be gleaned from a disconnected series of arguments for and against the use of computers in the classroom, from numerous epigraphs whose relevance is often unclear, from discussions of brain and child development which are only tangential to the main thesis and which fail to support or discredit it. The book is replete with guidelines for the proper use of computers in the home and school, yet these guidelines are too abstract and numerous to serve a practical purpose.
Failure to Connect is irritatingly inconsistent—just when the reader is ready to concede the point that computers do not belong in the classroom, the author backtracks and says that, well, maybe, after age seven computers are good for our children. She then cites alleged triumphs of computer use in grades 2-12, all of which are unconvincing and ascribable probably to good teaching, not to the computerization of childhood.
It’s the kind of book, then, that could have benefited from a more careful editing and, perhaps, from a publisher less averse to championing unpopular causes. Yet, its obvious shortcomings notwithstanding, Failure to Connect is a wonderful book. It’s wonderful because it takes courage to stand up to the computer, political, and educational establishments and to raise questions about the very wisdom of introducing computers, unthinkingly and en masse, into our children’s lives. It’s a wonderful book because it contains, here and there, amidst the irritating irrelevancies and incongruities, remarkable insights and reflections. It’s wonderful because it is not merely based on armchair speculations, but on endless hours of astute observations of schoolroom realities. It’s wonderful, besides, because Jane Healy cares about children.
I shall now try to summarize the book’s central argument. To make the reader’s task a bit easier than my own, I shall pick, choose, and rearrange. This idiosyncratic rendition will be then followed by an evaluation of the book’s key message.
To begin with, "today's children are the subject of a vast and optimistic experiment." The experiment "involves getting kids ‘on computers’ at school and at the home in hopes that technology will improve the quality of learning and prepare the young for the future." This, it should be noted, is not a cheap experiment: in the U.S. alone, the annual price tag hovers around $20 billion.
Moreover, most Americans planning to buy home computers cite children's education as the main reason. Americans believe that computer mastery is the third most important skill for school graduates to have, outdone only by basic skills (the 3 R’s) and good work habits, and far outranking honesty, curiosity, history, or Shakespeare.
Why are computers so popular among parents and decision makers? For one thing "it is all too easy to become so seduced by the glitz and novelty of this wondrous equipment that we make optimistic assumptions about what it is doing" for our children’s brains. "One’s initial reaction to much children’s software is bedazzlement; it takes a while to realize that the remarkable tricks are mostly being played by the computer, not by the child."
Another reason for the computer’s appeal is the almighty dollar. "The campaign to introduce computers in our schools is well financed and enthusiastically supported by major corporations. These corporations, needless to say, have vast advertising budgets, and can get their message across." "The educational value of today's computers has been vastly oversold to parents, educators, and the general public, primarily by people who benefit financially from adding computers and software to the traditional educational mix."
Then there is the justified malaise about our K-12 educational system. We may be "grasping at a technocentric ‘quick fix’ for a multitude of problems we have failed to address."
The computer has undeniably proved its efficacy in the grown-up world of commerce, war, and information retrieval, but should we grant it, as well, a K-12 teaching certificate? There are many reasons for questioning the wisdom of doing so:
1. Computerization of our K-12 educational system is based on faith, not on hard facts. "Experience suggests that our enchantment with the computer should be tempered by a critical look at whether anything educational is really being accomplished." At the moment, "there is no proof—or even convincing evidence—that it will work." "The few studies showing positive results for educational technology have been largely funded by computer corporations or conducted by educators who are (or would like to become) consultants for the technology business."
2. Then there is the question of opportunity costs. The money, time, space, and creative imagination now dedicated to computers in both homes and schools could be used elsewhere. Thus, the massive ongoing computer expenditures are draining funds from such traditional areas as individualized instruction, physical education, art, music, drama, non-digital library resources, and textbooks. Healy visits, for instance, an urban school and asks the computer coordinator:
"That lab of yours is a great room—where did they find all that space?"
The answer is:
"Well, it used by be the music room. You know we’ve been having these budget cuts, so they had to eliminate some the extras in the curriculum."
The same goes for play: a time played with the computer in the basement could be just as well used for creatively playing with real kids in the sunny world above. Instead of computer technicians, one can hire developmental psychologists, paraeducators, or coaches. Or one may simply reduce the outrageously high teacher/student ratio in our schools.
3. Computers are far more expensive than their already high price tag would seem to suggest. The technology is still in its exponential phase, with no end in sight, so computers must often be replaced within two to three years of purchase. Computers so far are notoriously unreliable and require an expensive army of specialists to keep their fragile circuitry above water. Schools must often be re-wired and teachers be continuously re-trained.
4. We know from experience that innovative social experiments must be judged by their fruits, not by the enthusiasm of their supporters and beneficiaries. Yet, Healy’s observations strongly suggest that, all too often, computer education fails to deliver the goods. In fact, "once they reach the school, these machines are either misused or underused, owing to lack of technical support, teacher preparation, and software that turns learning into trivial game-playing." This gap between the real and ideal can be best brought home with concrete examples.
In one inner city school, ten-year-old Raul, sitting in front of his expensive machine, "effortlessly solves a few simple addition problems and then happily accepts his reward—a series of smash-and-blast games in which he manages to demolish a sizable number of aliens before he is electronically corralled into another series of computations. Groaning slightly, he quickly solves the problems and segues expertly into the next space battle. By the time I move on, Raoul has spent many more minutes zapping aliens than he has doing math. My teacher’s soul cringes at the thought of important learning time squandered. I also wonder if what we are really teaching Raoul is that he should choose easy problems so he can play longer, or that the only reason to use his brain even slightly is to be granted—by an automaton over which he has no personal control—some mindless fun as a reward." Thus, left alone, children in school and at home more often than not use computers to play games, not for education.
Here is another example of how reality beats the programmer's alleged intentions. We are now visiting first graders in an exclusive private school. While the majority engages in the useless activity of "drawing" ready-made pictures, a few choose "a 'problem-solving' game, making their way through a 'virtual’ building—vividly depicted in realistic graphics—in a quest to solve a mystery, noticing clues as they go along and making inferences about how each relates to the goal. Trying to get kids to reason and draw conclusions is important, but the way these youngsters (and even older ones I watched) go about playing the game obviates the purpose, since they approach the problem purely as ‘guess-and-test' challenge. That is, one player watches and makes cryptic comments while the mouse-handler runs through the brightly colored scenarios as quickly as possible, clicking randomly until something works. Having learned, purely by trial and error, how to get to level one, they randomly click again until they master level two and so on. Thus, they eventually build up a seemingly impressive repertoire of the right moves to make without having had to reason about anything."
A third example of actual reality: a stuffy room full of computers still in their dusty boxes, as their use would have required drilling through the school’s asbestos walls.
5. Play is important, yet computer play is so much more impoverished than the real thing. Consider, for instance, such old-fashioned activities as fingerpainting or fashioning clay. The real things, most people would have to agree, surpass their cyberspace imitations. Reality takes place in three dimensions, often involving interactions and dialog among the children, physical movement, and creativity.
6. Computers are used to advertise products and to commercially exploit children. A great deal of the information computers provide is propaganda—somebody trying to sell a product or a viewpoint. This raises moral questions about their use as an educational tool in the first place. How are kids supposed to separate wheat from chaff? How can a ten-year-old distinguish between propaganda and honest attempts to portray the real world? Moreover, the commercial propaganda may cause family conflicts, lower self-esteem, and lead kids to experiment with drugs and alcohol.
7. Then there is health: "It is perhaps typical of a society that seems to care more for hi-tech than for the health of our young that these issues have been so effectively swept under the carpet. Who wants to think about carpal tunnel syndrome, impaired vision, postural complaints, or even radiation emissions?" Who wants to think about "lack of normal physical activity," or the computer’s "effects on the growing brain"?
8. Children, Healy argues, often become addicted to computers, often at the expense of social lives and studies. Computers offer an easy, but undesirable, alternative to learning how to get along with people. In fact, young excessive users sometimes manifest autistic-like symptoms.
9. Computers may adversely affect language development of young children.
10. Healy cites one study which noted a 50% drop in creativity scores in children using a popular drill-and-practice reading software.
11. There are many distractions on the internet and on one’s own computer, and a great deal of useless information, so students surfing on their own, at home or at school, waste about 95 percent of their time.
Are there any valid arguments for the computerization of childhood?
We are told, explains Healy, that computers are virtually indispensable in the world of adults, and hence that children should prepare themselves for life by mastering computers as early as possible. Now there is no denying, for better or worse, the impact of computers. But computer mastery can be comfortably acquired later in life. As Healy explains, once on campus, computer illiterate college students who know how to read, communicate, and think, can master the computer in a few weeks.
Another argument is that computers are amazingly versatile and capable. Indeed they are, but this does not mean that they are extraordinary teaching aids, or that real, living, teaching aids—which can be gotten at a fraction of the cost—could not do a better job of improving our schools.
After wisely dismissing such blindly technophilic arguments, Healy settles for a middle course, suggesting that computers should not be used before age seven and only used judiciously after that age. Two reasons seem to lead her to this qualified endorsement.
The first involves the many computer success stories she witnessed in her 2-12 visits.
The second stems from the poor state of education now: Computers have some genuine potential "to free the power of children's minds." "We have isolated youngsters in classrooms, mesmerizing them with memorization rather than calling on ingenuity, perseverance, and curiosity. . . . Well-planned uses of computers can ground education in projects that have intrinsic meaning, while still teaching critical skills of symbolic analysis and a core base of integrated knowledge. But this requires rethinking methods, asking children to tussle with real and intellectually challenging problems, and trusting them to be responsible in new and sometimes unsettling ways."
It is on this point of computer use between the ages of 7 and 18 that I part company with Jane Healy. We must realize, to begin with, that educational research is yet at its infancy, and hence, that all its conclusions must be taken with a grain of salt. In particular, each and every one of the success stories Healy relates is not, in my view, a tribute to the computer, but to other, more traditional, improvements that came along with the introduction of the computer. And while I fully share her unhappiness with the contemporary educational scene, I don’t for a moment believe that the computer could or should play more than a marginal role in its improvement.
In my view, the way out of the current quagmire is humanization and rationalization of our educational system, not its mechanization. We need to inject a bit more compassion and critical thinking into our schools. We need better training of teachers in subjects like math, science, art, or history (as opposed to endless, virtually useless, instruction about how to teach these subjects). We need a lower teacher/student ratio and a stronger emphasis on creativity and hands-on experiences, on understanding concepts (as opposed to useless memorization of facts), and on literature (as opposed to fossilized, grammar-based, language instruction). We ought to give poor children a fair chance of doing well. We must reduce the scandalously high levels of lead and other retardants in our children’s brains. Above all, we shall know that we have succeeded when our kids are as curious—and know as much math and literature—as did those gadgetless, upper class, kids of fifth century, B.C., Athens.
In my view then, Healy’s arguments and experiences demand a more radical stance. In K-12, computers may be gainfully used to improve the quality of life and educational experiences of children with special needs (e.g., blind or autistic). As well, a few computers in every school library can meaningfully improve cataloging, information retrieval, and storage. But, and for the very reasons Healy so wisely marshals in her book, computers should be banned from all other areas of the curriculum.
All in all, this is an important, insightful, and courageous book that should be read and taken to heart by anyone concerned with the minds and hearts of our children.