I was just watching a video of Clifford Stoll, a scientist/technician, and he very briefly raised one of the most interesting questions I've heard in a long time - do we have too many computers in schools? Should we have any?
This made me ask - did America's schools begin to fall behind the rest of the world when we introduced computers into the classroom? Do we ask kids to rely too little on their minds and too much on the technology?
Perhaps we are asking our children to just be computer operators and not to be free thinkers.
I have no answers to these questions, but as a former math teacher, I often questioned the wisdom of allowing calculators in school until long after we were sure that kids could add, subtract, multiply and divide. Being a mathematician requires that kids have a strong sense of the concept of "number" and they'll never get it by having machines do the basic work for them.
I'd love to see some research - did our students do better before they had computers?
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
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