My sister-in-law called the other day and announced she and her husband were going to buy a computer. "Not for us, you understand. For the kids."
"For the kids?" I asked. Mark is 2; Christopher, a ripe nine months.
"So they won't be behind."
Behind what? My sister-in-law clearly was afraid that her children would somehow be technological illiterates, a high-tech version of the Amish. Without the computer, her children would be saddled with the quaint but oh-so-out-of-date practice of perusing actual books instead of readouts, writing a letter on stationery instead of sending it electronically, playing marbles in the driveway instead of Space Invaders on a screen, and solving math problems with pencil and paper instead of with a program. Where does such a fear come from and is it valid?
I don't know much about computers beyond a first-level course in BASIC, but I do know about hype. If one watches enough computer commercials, one can begin to see the rootlets of my sister-in-law's fear. For one thing, computers are billed as the new mandarins of efficiency, electronic bureaucrats who don't take lunch breaks and who do "the job" simply and quickly, with streamlined no-nonsense. You see this most often in the business commercials, where the computer single-handedly(?) saves the important conference with a client or helps increase sales for a trucking firm in Peoria. It's very hard not to be caught up the excitement and drama of these commercials, where the computer seems to be at the heart of momentous decisions, coolly dealing out the answers in contrast to the emotional instability of its human operators. Humans are clearly secondary here, flawed and ignorant. Technology has triumphed again.
There are any number of holes in this hype. Let's take the bogeyman of efficiency. What exactly do the commercials mean by efficiency? Speed, perhaps. Computers do work fast, and they can process certain kinds of requests far faster than any human clerk could: calling up names and addresses, inventories, prices, and so on. But this is mundane office work, simple record-keeping. The secretaries and counter-help who do this sort of work don't "know" the computer in any essential way; instead, they simply push buttons. The computers are efficient in this sense, but it's no great cause for alarm since it takes ten minutes to learn the procedure. No child has to start at age two to get his clerkship skills in fine order.
And besides, all that efficiency is good mostly for businesses. How many of us need a constant up-dated inventory? Of toilet paper? Socks? Just look in the closet or the drawer. The usefulness of computers, at least as far as the hype goes, is not a usefulness most of us need or can use.
So speed is really beside the point. What about decision-making? Can't computers, because they're unemotional, make better decisions, and make them faster? There's a shift of mind here that has to be cleared up. Computers make decisions only in a very limited meaning of the phrase. They can only process information in the ways their programs dictate. They can't ever break out of that. Their sophistication depends upon the sophistication of the minds that programmed them. And these programs only ask computers to do what humans have always done: think and plan ahead, predict, shows trends, plot possibilities. They don't "make decisions" but follow the human brain patterns programmed into them. Humans still make the decisions, only one step removed. It's important to remember that the computer has no life separate from the humans who use and program it. If anything, humans need to be better at making decisions so that they make better programs.
But even if my sister-in-law can agree that computer efficiency and judgment are straw men, there is still education, and it's this, or more precisely the fear of being outdated, that drives her to the computer store. Computers can teach your children anything, so the hype goes. Computer makers had to go this route. Their first appeal, that of turning the family TV into an arcade, petered out when parents understandably became concerned about the amount of time (and the excessive number of dead aliens) their children wasted grinding joysticks and popping buttons. So the manufacturers added new programs, some of them quite interesting, to legitimize themselves as purveyors, not of games, but of that gloriously imprecise commodity, education. And it has obviously worked lucratively.
The question we have to ask ourselves is not whether the programs are good, but do they, in any vital way, teach? I would answer yes, but with an expensive, if hidden, price. Let me use the digital watch as an illustration. Assuming one can read numbers, one can read a digital watch. But in one way that "reading" is a senseless act; one is not really reading time at all. Reading a regular dial watch requires, on some level, an awareness of the relationship of seconds to minutes, minutes to hours, hours to days. The design of a dial clock is the result of a long process of grappling with the intricacies of celestial motion, crop planting, scientific exploration, and so on. Thus, the shape and function of the modern-day dial clock tell us much about how we perceive time.
A digital watch, on the other hand (pardon the pun), hides all that, buries it under the bushel of efficiency and progress. A child learning to tell time using a digital watch learns only numbers, and does not learn how to extrapolate the relationship of symbols (numbers) to abstract information (time and place). The child has to make no effort that ties him or her concretely to the surrounding world; instead, the connection is to the watch alone.
The educational computer games strike me in the same way. A child who learns words from the machine, from colored lights and funny voices and swift printouts, is learning more about the machine than he is about phonics. He's learning to depend upon the machine, to "communicate" with it, to be drawn into it, and inevitably he will believe that his relation to the machine, to its efficiency and clarity (which are, as we've seen, mainly myths), is stronger and more necessary than his relation to people, their problems and their aspirations. He will also depend upon the machine as a source of unimpeachable information (which, as we've also seen, is only as good as its programmers) as opposed to the more sluggish and imprecise thoughts of his fellow humans. In these regards, he will become less, not more, educated, if we mean education's etymological sense, "e-ducere," to lead out of (presumably ignorance).
Moreover, these computer games not only maim a vigorous relationship between child and world, they devalue the parents' role as arbiters for the child of life's experience. These games don't do anything that reasonably intelligent parents can't do, but without the vital interpretation that parents provide for children, the games will only make the children encyclopedic, technologically literate but existentially illiterate. Humans, despite their glorious skill at technology, still haven't escaped certain necessary patterns of maturation and self-awareness. These demand the sensual, historical, emotional involvement of human with human. We become our best selves when we learn through these patterns.
So my sister-in-law need not worry. There will be an appropriate time for purchasing a computer, when it can be used as an adjunct to -- rather than as a direct source of -- learning. In the meantime her sons ought to get outside and play and she and her husband ought to read to them, to help tie their natural creativity to a real world that is inevitably more complex, satisfying, challenging, and nourishing than any arrangement of blips, colors, dings, and funny squeaky voices.
* * *
But we cannot limit ourselves to such common sense as this, because there are more insidious issues attached to the marriage of computers and education. The September issue of Psychology Today has a generally adulatory article about computers in schools and how they will, in the words of one MIT professor, "mediate relationships that are ultimately between person and person." Recent programs on PBS have been doing the same trumpeting. Computers, so it seems, then, are not only helpful aids; they are the latest in messiahs. Such messianic attitudes about computers must thus change the direction of the debate. No longer can we argue simply about the propriety of computers for individual families, but instead we must broaden our purview to include such questions as: For whom? In which schools? And, given the recent rash of computer break-ins by young kids, What about morality?
The Psychology Today article points out that the main recipients of this new technology are children. "Children" is a nice word, but not very accurate. Who, and most especially, where? The article is not too clear on this. Let me be clearer. The bulk of the 42 million schoolchildren in this country are in the cities. The horrors of urban education are well known, having been the subject of a barrage of reporting last summer. Yet, while this cannonade has dropped off in the past months, the facts don't change simply because the media doesn't report them. American schooling overall does not educate. And the millions of people who attend the schools are being handed diplomas worth, in the words of Phil Keisling, "the educational equivalent of worthless notes from the Weimar Republic."
Picture, then, the vast desert of a big city school system. Not all the schools in the system will be bad, but one can rest assured that the schools that are bad, overwhelmingly bad, are the ones with minority and poor students, the ones, it would seem, who most need the kind of computer education touted in the article. And will they get it? Of course not. Not only because the computer can't solve their problems, but also because the bias in our culture doesn't run their way. All one needs to do is listen to our President talk about civil rights and look at the erosion in the small gains minorities made in the 60s and 70s, and one can readily agree that this culture does not value minorities, and has no intention of doing so.
No, the computer education will end up, not surprisingly, in schools housing people that look remarkably like the sons and daughters of the programmer and professor promoting the whole deal. That is because while most people believe computers are socially neutral, the fact is that computers are a middle-class technology, providing enjoyment and services that can only really be used by people making a certain amount of money and accepting certain presumptions about the way things are. Computers are a pet project of the middle-class.
This can be seen even more strongly in the way the computers are being used in the schools. Primarily, the computers will be used to teach "problem-solving skills," relying upon games and the elimination of failure through "intrinsic motivation." On the surface the games look very interesting. Most of the new educational software asks students to solve problems by manipulating a language to achieve the desired the result. Most solving is done as a game, and instead of looking for the "right" answer, the student instead dares to try new procedures.
But what are the problems students are asked to solve? Overwhelmingly they are problems only computers would be interested in, and, by extension, computer operators, i.e., children. In short, they are trivial problems in the long run because they are really unattached to life. Many of the boosters of computer education rebut by saying that the skills children learn are portable, but what skills are they talking about? The problems they are asked to solve are all amenable to the logic of the computer. One such game is Rocky's Boots, whose goal is to build working circuits that conform to the same logical laws that form the basis for computer. These are linear problems: One gets to the solution along a straight line. And an answer is always presumed available.
Yet most of the intractable problems of life are not linear, are not even circular, but often end nowhere, with no definite answer, such as the problems of poverty the minority students have to suffer. The kind of thinking being taught, even though under the auspices of a humanitarian Deweyesque belief in the child's welfare, is technocratic and far outside the traditional psychological and philosophical approaches to life. Children are being asked to immerse themselves into a fantasy world (fantasy is one of the seven essential elements of computer education) and use skills that are at best limited in their applicability to solving problems that, while perhaps building skills, have little pertinence to the lives of real people. The success that these computer programs engender is a contrived and inbred success, a kind of success that can only lead inwardly, towards the computer rather than away from it.
But even more tragic, I think, is that students, are again being denied a useful place in the sun. Now they are playing games under the guise of learning, but they are really being pushed farther away from the kind of life that requires engagement and risk, and thus choice and commitment, and thus morality. The computer life they are being taught is so clean in contrast to the dirtiness of normal life. Morality becomes the logic necessary to solve a particular problem. And we have all seen the result of that sort of thinking in the Vietnam war, an example far more powerful than the glitz of Wargames. Where, then, is there room being made for morality?
* * *
Newsweek recently had a cover story about "crackers," teenage computer jocks who break into other computer systems, mostly just for the fun of breaking the code. So far nothing disastrous has happened, such as bank records being wiped out, but that doesn't get around some troublesome questions in regard to "cracking." The teenagers (and not-so-teenagers - some are closer to thirty) who do this seem genuinely interested in simply breaking the code. In their statements, and even in their faces, one cannot really detect any traces of guile or maliciousness. To them, it's a technical question, not a moral one. To them, the other computer systems are challenges, obstacles in their personal path of satisfaction. Perhaps they can be excused on the basis of sheer high spirits and perhaps even gently praised for being so innovative.
And then again perhaps not. The shadings here get very grey. What might be innovative high spirits is, to others, breaking and entering. Do we then consider information, stored on silicon chips, the same as the family silver? If so, how do we then make distinctions between petty and grand larceny? These questions never occurred to the crackers, but they nevertheless exist for everyone else.
Other problems spin off from this. One of my students belonged to a club whose sole purpose for existing was to break the code of games on the market, make copies of the games, and pass them around for people to use. They were rightly called "pirates', and anyone paying attention to the papers knows the problems companies are having with the piracy of tapes, videos, and games, which deprive them of profit and market. This student also meets with other clubs from around the country so that he can build up, for a cost of $2 per disk, a library of games that he would never have been able to afford had he had to pay for them. He contends that it is not stealing, that it is no different than making a cassette tape of an album for the car stereo.
Now, is he stealing? He says no. All he feels he's doing is using the intelligence and technology available to him to gain something for himself, showing, as he said, a sharp entrepreneurial spirit. He does not see the issue in moral terms at all. It is neither right nor wrong. The operative question is, Can it be done?
Are these kids wrong in what they do? The question they ask - Can it be done? - is not by itself an immoral question. But it is an amoral question, since it provides no criteria beyond technical facility by which to judge actions and results. And technical facility, as we have seen time and time again, when divorced from a union with morality, ends up as dangerous and sometimes terminal for human life. It is a utilitarian question, satisfied to settle on calculus rather than judgment. These kids are not so much innocent as ignorant because they have been lopsidedly trained in this technology. As technocrats they've not been forced to deal with the consequences of their own actions, the starting point for all morality. The fact that they think their cracking has no moral side to it at all only underscores this gap in their education. They cannot even conceive of morality, much less adhere to it.
Yes, my student was stealing, much as he may not want to hear it. And, yes, those crackers are breaking and entering. They may enjoy the thrill of success, but they should also suffer the agony of defeat, the defeat, that is, of their detachment from the questions all of us have to consider if we are to live in a society worth living in. They cannot remain absolved of the requirement to reflect upon possible consequences of their decisions; to deny them this would be to deny them a firm ground upon which to be a human being.
Does this sound too dire for the 20th century? Too unsophisticated? I don't think so. In fact, I don't think it sounds dire enough. Everyone knows about the problems of public schools in this country. But no matter how bad they get, the schools will always remain places where humans must confront humans. And while we may not like the kinds of confrontations that go on there, such dislike ought to spur us to spend the time and money to make sure good confrontations occur. To abdicate this responsibility to a computer is wrong because all it will encourage is isolation and amorality. When all decisions become logical rather than existential, technical rather than moral, we all lose in the end because we lose those actions that make us human: decision, reflection, choice.
* * *
There are other reasons why computers won't reform schools, one of them generated by a specifically American attitude towards education. Americans have never been quite clear about what it is they want their schools to do. But underneath all the vagueness has been the powerful notion that the schools should somehow make democratic America more democratic, help preserve the blessings of our freedom. And Americans have tended to see this preservation in terms of what someone can do rather than how someone can be. That is why we have such a large emphasis in our history on practical accomplishment. With the tangible goods of a Panama Canal or a victory on VE Day we can somehow, we think, measure how much progress we have made in our preservation of democracy.
This same attitude is being used both to criticize and remedy the schools. Peter Brimelow, writing in the September 19 issue of Fortune, proposes that education's problems "will remain chronic until education is exposed to competition." Regardless of what "competition" means in an economic sense, Brimelow is being very American here. He wants the schools to produce something (obviously students good for American business) much as any industry would produce a product, and for them to create some tangible tie between cause (money spent) and effect (literate student), as if the whole educational venture were amenable to cost-benefit analysis. Brimelow, and others who follow his lead, such as those advocating tax credits and vouchers, do not like to deal with the messiness of human nature; they want man to be economic man, making rational choices based upon a clear reading of needs and desires. Unfortunately, schools don't work like this, or, to put it more negatively, if they did work like that, they would not be places to which people would want to send their children.
Computers are being proposed as educational panaceas for the same motivations. Computers get children to do something. They are pushing buttons and laughing at the funny games and apparently having a good time as they learn how to manipulate logic. But it is an ersatz logic, one that may be internally consistent but is existentially irrelevant, unattached as it is to the normal problems that confront human beings. Computers will not solve education's problems, and Americans will not get the quick fix that they want in the schools, because those problems begin outside the school, far before any child walks into a classroom. And this is not anything a cost-benefit analysis or economic analogy can remedy because it is outside the effective range of such approaches to life.
The motivation for learning begins in the family and in the daily interactions of the child with the world. The families have to get their act together, but many can't, such as poor black families. Forty-one percent of black families are headed by women without husbands present, the divorce rate among blacks has more than doubled in a decade, and 49% of black children live in one-parent homes. Rampant teenage pregnancy is also taking its toll, and not only among poor blacks. And if the urban public schools are increasingly becoming the place of last resort for poor children, while more able parents send their children to private schools, these poor children come to that school divested of the basic essential intellectual tools to learn because the families they come from won't have provided them. If the government is seriously interested in the schools, then it had better look to ways to better families.
Increasing poverty, demographic shifts, changing job patterns, a titillating advertising culture - all these, and more, impinge on the performance of the schools, yet none of these can be demonstrably affected by the mainstream solutions to the dilemma. The solutions must be broadened, and they must in some way center on those people offering the present anemic solutions. Reformers, most especially people in government and business, have to ask themselves what they have done and can do to improve the moral and intellectual quality of our culture. If children are no longer voracious readers, to what extent are advertising executive responsible? If children come to school ill-fed and ill-prepared, to what extent are government economic policies to blame? These questions, and questions like these, must be asked before we can have any responsible or interesting unraveling of the Gordian knot.
* * *
The problem with much of the talk about school reform is that everyone is talking about means without talking about ends. President Reagan and others are talking about merit pay, performance evaluations, more homework, longer days and years, tougher discipline (which usually means more punishment) without acknowledging that to speak about these means as ends is to avoid the more intangible but certainly more important issue of attitudes and beliefs. What, after all, is the end of the educational enterprise? Or rather, the ends, since no single end can encompass the diversity of the school population. Is it to teach people simply to read and write? If that be true, then it would be best to do that at a young age and put the money in good libraries so that the person could pursue an education according to his or her wishes. We don't need multibillion dollar institutions to teach the rather simple and natural tasks of reading and writing. Is it to create Jefferson's informed citizenry? A nice bit of rhetoric, of course, but what is "informed"? Knowing the capitals of the fifty states? Being informed means being involved, and how can students be involved if they are secreted away in institutions and kept busy doing busy work? These are hard questions because they are philosophical, not technical, and cannot be "solved" by the advocacy of any particular means. In fact, they are not questions that can be solved at all, but must be continually asked as a way of checking the solvency of our thinking and the goodness of our actions. I would like to offer some ways to think about these questions, some ways to get at the understanding of what education could be doing.
Formal schooling in any democratic society has a double burden. On the one hand, it works to promote the individuality of the student. On the other hand, it tries to curb that individuality so that the student fits into the society. The latter is always easier, though more destructive in the long run, than the patience and intelligence it takes to sit, listen, guide, and allow for differences. I think we first need to think about how these two intentions can be balanced. Do we teach much about democratic responsibility and personal self-government by forcing young children to attend schools, under the penalty of law? Do we teach much about the need to make personal choices with as much information as possible by not allowing students a say in how they are educated? The answer is no. One way to think about school reform is to think about how to better make students a functioning part of the system, and not just the passive recipients of whatever teachers want to hand out. This will encourage a sense of responsibility and pride in self and institution, in addition to teaching what it means to participate and volunteer (a cause dear to the hearts of libertarians and neoliberals alike).
Another area to think about is curriculum. Many of the reformers today are talking about more homework. It is true that people learn more when they spend more time "on task," which is only common sense. But a question should also be raised about what it is they are supposed to be spending more time on. Are teachers simply going to give an absolute amount, pile it on, in other words? This is closer to burying students than it is to encouraging independent thinking. What, after all, is homework? What's it for? The reason more homework and stricter discipline won't work is because it only further divides a divided curriculum. Doesn't science, for instance, have anything to do with history? Doesn't English has something to do with art? Schools, for the sake of an apparent bureaucratic efficiency, have always divided up learning into discrete units, into departments, and very few programs exist where these departments admit that knowledge overlaps, that how Melville wrote had something to do with the history of his times. This way of integrating knowledge, of making connections, should be the reason for a curriculum; and homework should spin off this. Only then will the homework have a logical reason for being heavy, insistent, and constant. And it may get done by students who are delighted to find connections. After all, students suffer from a debilitating sense of unconnectedness as it is, and humans generally don't like to feel isolated. Changing the curriculum can make students feel more involved while tying them closer to the concerns of the society around them.
Other notions that might be questioned include, Why should students spend all day in school? What, after all, is the purpose of making school what they do with their lives, what they do for a living? Longer school days and years, especially if it means increased burdens of homework, will cure nothing. School should be combined with work programs or apprenticeships, and most especially for those students in college tracks who never get to take auto mechanics. This will have several results. One would be to cut out the harmful and unneeded division of school society into the college-bound students and the voc-tech students, which manifests our society's bias against manual labor and gives an unearned value to white-collar bureaucratic attitudes and practices. Second, people would learn a useful trade. Schooling by itself is not a marketable skill. Right now it cannot be exchanged for anything but more schooling, until one gets the magic degree that supposedly allows entrance into the professional work force. This is an absurd waste of time and talent. Students should be learning all along what it is they might like to do with their lives, with the opportunity and encouragement to try out several options instead of being restricted to one supposedly lucrative economic enterprise.
Computers and the "way we have always done it" syndrome suffer from the same insufficiency of vision. Deliberating about school reform must go beyond machines and machine-like responses. Thinking about school reform will require an openness to fresh thoughts and a willingness to try radical experiments and innovations. It is time for the six blind men to confer about the elephant.