Geek Heresy (4 page)

Warschauer heard many teachers complain that computers in the classroom had doubled their workload. Not only did teachers have to design lesson plans involving computers, they also had to write low-tech backup plans in case of technology failures, which were frequent.

Even when it worked, technology wasn’t necessarily being used well. In one class, Warschauer witnessed students typing names of countries into a search engine, clicking on whatever webpages came up, and aimlessly copying snippets of text into word-processing software. He wrote, “Although the students could be said to be performing the task of searching for material on the Web, they were not developing any of the cognitive or information literacy skills that such a task would normally involve.”

Warschauer also found that poorer districts had more difficulty with the equipment. What mattered wasn’t the technology – all of the schools had about the same number of computers per student and similar access to the Internet. But, he wrote, “placing computers and Internet connections in low-[income] schools, in and of itself, does little to address the serious educational challenges faced by these schools. To the extent that an emphasis on provision of equipment draws attention away from other important resources and interventions, such an emphasis can in fact be counterproductive.”
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Other scholars, journalists, and educators have taken a hard look at electronics in the American classroom and found them wanting. In
The
Dumbest Generation
, Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein cites statistic after statistic showing that “digital natives” – millennial children who have never known a life without the Internet – aren’t doing any better in school than their parents did. He rails against the fetish we make of technology: “It superpowers [students’] social impulses, but it blocks intellectual gains.”
¹⁶
Todd Oppenheimer, in
The Flickering Mind
, grieves over his visits to computerized schools across the country. All too often, he finds digital education to be about cutting and pasting graphics into PowerPoint.
¹⁷
The school board president of the Liverpool Central district near Syracuse, New York, Mark Lawson, canceled a disappointing school laptop program after a run of seven years. There “was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement – none. . . . The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”
¹⁸

In other words, even in America, where infrastructure is reliable and technology is plentiful, computers don’t fix struggling schools.

Nevertheless, when I returned to the United States in 2010, I came home to a country that was on a whole new kick about technologies for education. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave talk after talk urging more technology in the classroom. One keynote he delivered in 2012 was indistinguishable from a tech-company sales pitch. In it he mentioned technology forty-three times: “technology is the new platform for learning”; “technology is a powerful force for educational equity”; “technology-driven learning empowers students and gives them control of the content”; “technology . . . provides access to more information through a cell phone than I could find as a child in an entire library.” (In the same speech, he mentioned teachers only twenty-five times.)
¹⁹

Marc Prensky is the consultant who coined the term “digital natives.” He claimed that “today’s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors.” Immersed in devices from birth, they are growing up in a new world that their digital-immigrant parents don’t fully understand. His recommendation? We should teach digital natives in the language they were born in: “My own preference
for teaching Digital Natives,” he wrote, “is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.”
²⁰

Egged on by the chorus of support, America is in an orgy of educational technologies despite scarce evidence that they improve learning. In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District announced a $1 billion program to distribute iPads to all of its students.
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Donors flock to support the online Khan Academy, where the disembodied voice of Salman Khan accompanies video-recorded blackboard instruction. And MOOCs – massively open online courses – from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and other universities boast about the millions of people from around the world taking their free classes.

The fever is contagious. Despite everything I learned in India, I wasn’t immune to it. I was once on a panel at MIT with Negroponte where I outlined my hard-won lessons about technology for education. He didn’t like what I said, and he went on the offensive. But he did it with such confidence and self-assurance that, as I listened, I felt myself wanting to be persuaded: Children
are
naturally curious, aren’t they? Why
wouldn’t
they teach themselves on a nice, friendly laptop?

As I heard more of the technology hype, however, I realized that it didn’t engage with rigorous evidence. It was empty sloganeering that collapsed under critical thinking.

Take Negroponte’s claim that children are natural learners who will teach themselves with well-designed gadgets. Its subversive edge is part of its charm. Pink Floyd lyrics echo in the mind: “We don’t need no education; we don’t need no thought control.” But even casual observation suggests that the truth is otherwise. When left alone with technology, few children open up educational apps. What they really want is to play Angry Birds. And teenagers are not that different. Los Angeles’s iPad initiative hit an early glitch when older students hacked the tablets’ security software and gained access to games and social media.
²²

Another highly touted project that doesn’t measure up is called the Hole-in-the-Wall. Its main proponent is Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University. He regales audiences with what he says happened when he embedded a weatherproofed
PC in the wall of a New Delhi slum. Without any supervision, local children started using the computer. They taught themselves to open applications, draw pictures, and use the Internet. In later studies, Mitra made the astonishing claim that his brand of “minimally invasive education” allowed children in poor villages to learn English and molecular biology entirely on their own.
²³
Mitra went on to become an internationally celebrated speaker and won the 2013 TED Prize.

But some who visit Mitra’s Hole-in-the-Wall sites find that they are unused, defunct, or occupied by older boys playing video games.
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Payal Arora, a professor of media and communication at Erasmus University in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, found one village where instead of the reputed computers, there was only a “cemented structure in which there are three gaping holes.” Several years after the computers were installed, “few of the people [in the village], including the students, had any recollection of the project.” One local teacher “recalled a few boys using these kiosks, but ‘usually for things like games, that’s all.’” Confronted with these points, Mitra softened his position, admitting, “It is certainly incorrect to suggest that free access to outdoor-located PCs is all that is involved” in real learning.
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A 2013 study by Robert Fairlie and Jonathan Robinson – economists with no stake in technology – slams a heavy lid on the sarcophagus for the quixotic idea that children will teach themselves digitally. In an experimental trial involving over 1,000 students in grades 6 through 10 in America, they found that students randomly selected to receive laptops for two years certainly spent time on them, but that the time was devoted to games, social networking, and other entertainment. And whatever merit these activities might have in theory, in practice those with laptops did no better “on a host of educational outcomes, including grades, standardized test scores, credits earned, attendance, and disciplinary actions,” than did a control group without computer access at home.
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In other words, unfettered access to technology doesn’t cause learning any more than does unfettered access to textbooks.

Technology advocates ignore studies like this. Instead they prey on parental fears. Secretary Duncan insists that “technological competency
is a requirement for entry into the global economy,” hinting that our children will be at a disadvantage if they grow up without computers.
²⁷
But do students need to be steeped in technology to be competitive? Duncan is himself proof that it’s not. By his own admission, he grew up in a “technology-challenged household.” Apparently, when he was young, his family didn’t even own a television, to say nothing of a PC.
²⁸
Like most of today’s leaders above the age of forty-five, Duncan wasn’t exposed to digital technology when he was young, yet we can be sure that his mother is proud of his accomplishments in the twenty-first century.

Years of data from the world’s most credible educational yardstick show that technology in the classroom has little to do with good scores. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is the Olympics of formal education. Participating countries administer standardized academic achievement tests to their fifteen-year-olds, allowing cross-country comparisons in several subjects. South Korea happens to be both high-tech and high-performing, but Finland and China consistently outperform other countries despite low-tech approaches.
²⁹
In a 2010 report, PISA analysts wrote that “the bottom line is that the quality of a school system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers,” regardless of available educational resources such as computers.
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Anyone can learn to tweet. But forming and articulating a cogent argument in any medium requires thinking, writing, and communication skills.
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While those skills are increasingly expressed through text messaging, PowerPoint, and email, they are not taught by them. Similarly, it’s easy to learn to “use” a computer, but the underlying math skills necessary for accounting or engineering require solid preparation that only comes by doing problem sets – readily accomplished with or without a computer. In other words, there’s a big difference between learning the digital tools of modern life (easy to pick up and getting easier by the day, thanks to improving technology) and learning the critical thinking skills necessary for an information age (hard to learn and therefore demanding good adult guidance). If anything, it’s less
useful to master the tools of today, because we know there will be different tools tomorrow.

What Wise Parents Know

For about a month in the spring of 2013, I spent my mornings at Lakeside School, a private school in Seattle whose students are the scions of the Pacific Northwest elite. The beautiful red-brick campus looks like an Ivy League college and costs almost as much to attend. The school boasts Bill Gates among its alumni, and there is no dearth of technology. Teachers post assignments on the school’s intranet; classes communicate by email; and every student carries a laptop (required) and a smartphone (not).

In this context, what do parents do when they think their children need an extra boost? I was there as a substitute tutor for a friend whose students spanned the academic spectrum. A few of them were taking honors calculus. They were diligent but wanted a sounding board as they worked on tough problems. Others, sometimes weighed down by intensive extracurricular activities, struggled in geometry and algebra. I would review material with them and offer pointers as they did assignments. Yet another group required no substantive help at all. They just needed some prodding to finish their homework on time. Despite their differences, the students had one thing in common: What their parents were paying for was adult supervision.

All of the content I tutored is available on math websites and in free Khan Academy videos, and every student had round-the-clock Internet access. But even with all that technology, and even at a school with a luxurious 9:1 student-teacher ratio, what their parents wanted for their kids was extra adult guidance. If this is the case for Lakeside students with their many life advantages, imagine how much more it must be the case for the world’s less privileged children.

If the Labors of Hercules had an intellectual equivalent, it would be modern education. By the end of high school, we expect a student to know about 60,000 words; read
To Kill a Mockingbird
; learn the Pythagorean theorem; absorb a national history; and have peered through
a microscope. Advanced students will put on Greek tragedies; rediscover the principles of calculus; memorize the Gettysburg Address; and measure the pull of gravity. In effect, students have twelve years to reconstruct the world’s profoundest thoughts – discoveries that history’s greatest thinkers took centuries to hit upon.

This is not casual play, and it requires directed motivation. It doesn’t matter what flashy interactive graphics exist to teach this material unless a child does the hard internal work to digest it. To persevere, children need guidance and encouragement for all the hours of a school day, at least nine months of the year, sustained over twelve years. Electronic technology is simply not up to the task. What’s worse, it distracts students from the necessary effort with blingy rewards and cognitive candy. The essence of quality children’s education continues to be caring, knowledgeable, adult attention.

Miracle or Mirage?

Yet, it can’t be true that technology never helps education. That doesn’t square with what my team found with the MultiPoint pilot, or, for that matter, with any project where formal trials prove a technology’s value. There is plenty of reliable research in which students with technology gain something over those without.