The CRT Before the Horse

Teachers want them. Parents insist on them. Business requires them. And children are drawn to them like electrons to a cathode-ray tube. Of all the remedies prescribed for the ailing schools, none has generated more excitement than the call for large numbers of desktop computers. This fall 86% of all high schools, 77% of all junior highs and 61% of all grade schools have at least one machine, according to Market Data Retrieval Inc., a Connecticut research firm. But the rush to hardware looks very much like a nationwide case of putting the CRT before the horse. No one has stopped to resolve the basic issue, says David Moursund, professor of computer science at the University of Oregon: "what and how much students should learn about computers."

Many computers are used as high-tech flash cards in math and spelling. Scorning such applications, computer scientists argue that students should be "computer literate," and then argue among themselves about what that means. Berkeley Computer Educator Arthur Luehrmann, who coined the term, has defined it as "the ability to do computing and not merely to recognize, identify or be aware of alleged facts about computing." M.I.T. Professor Seymour Papert, author of the influential book Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas, agrees, insisting that all children should be taught to program computers, both for the intellectual exercise and for the experience of mastering a piece of modern technology.

Not at all, say other experts. They maintain that it is a waste of time to teach programming, because future computers will likely be fed their instructions in completely different ways. What is more, insists Karen Sheingold, director of the Center for Children and Technology at Manhattan's Bank Street College of Education,' 'the transfer of computer training to other areas is not necessarily automatic.'' One study of sixth-grade programmers from Cambridge, Mass., tends to bear Sheingold out: while 69% could instruct a computer to draw a 90DEG angle, only 19% could actually construct one on paper.

For this reason, a newer chorus of experts says, computers should be employed neither as automated tutors to deliver the content of standard courses nor as tools to train junior programmers, but as resources to enrich the curriculum. "One of the best uses of computers for high school students would be to help teach kids to write," says Henry Becker, director of an ongoing Johns Hopkins classroom-technology study. But Becker estimates that high school computers are being used for word processing less than 7% of the time.

To Norman Kurland, director of adult learning services at the New York City department of education, "The real challenge is teaching students how to find information and how to use it to solve problems." Says Marc Tucker, director of the Carnegie Corporation's project on information technology and education: "What a marvelous thing it would be if kids and teachers could use computers to answer a whole bunch of 'what if questions: What if the Black Death had spread half as fast? What if there had been a quarter as much money in circulation in 1475? What if the climate had been 10DEG colder as the Euphrates was turning into desert?"

There is another what if. What if all the students who could use a computer got access to one? An estimated 250,000 computers are now distributed among 44 million students. To reach what M.I.T.'s Papert calls the "threshold of seriousness"--one half hour of computer use a day per child--would require at least another 3 million machines. Estimated cost: $4.5 billion. And if sufficient equipment were made available, the schools would still face a costlier problem: teacher training. As a rule of thumb, each dollar spent on computers requires two more dollars to teach the teachers how to use them. "If you don't change the preparation of the teachers," says Tucker, "putting a lot of computers into our schools would be an appalling waste of money."

Considering the philosophical, pedagogical and financial problems ahead, the supposed computer revolution in schools seems barely under way. "What you have now," says Alan Kay, chief scientist at Atari, "is a bunch of people attempting to teach violin who have had a six-week course in what the violin is and who have never heard violin music before." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.