The Networks of Educational Hell Are Wired With Good Intentions

On practically every issue of import--Medicare, tax cuts, welfare reform--you’ll find the President and the Speaker of the House bitterly and diametrically opposed. But when it comes to the future of education, the two enthusiastically agree: America’s schools belong in cyberspace. Every classroom in the country should be wired to the Internet.

“By being technologically smart . . . we can open up for these young people a very different future,” asserted House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) at a newly wired elementary school in Washington, D.C., this May. Speaking at San Francisco’s Exploratorium science museum last month, President Clinton heralded a public-private initiative to link the state’s 12,000 elementary and high schools, comparing it to a “high-tech barn-raising.” The Internet was cited as essential to bringing California’s classrooms into the next century.

No, it’s not. Sadly, the networks to educational hell are wired with good intentions. America’s top two politicians are peddling a techno-vision that has virtually nothing to do with making schools better. The Internet is a fantastic, vibrant and evolving medium that will no doubt change the world. However, it is not a technology destined to improve our schools. This Internet infatuation offers a pathetic but telling symbol of just how badly the history and role of technology in education is misunderstood. This infatuation is about politics and pandering, not promise and potential.

Should Teddy Roosevelt have called for a telephone on every school desk and an operator in every classroom because Alexander Graham Bell’s grand invention was changing American society? Maybe “telephonic literacy” should have been enshrined in the 1910 school curricula? Would connecting America’s classrooms have radically improved the quality of our great-grandparents’ education and better prepared them for the rigors of the marketplace?

Perhaps John F. Kennedy--who obviously understood the transformative power of television--should have called on Americans to put a TV set in every classroom as well as a man on the moon. After all, television was destined to become the dominant communications medium of the generation. Why not rebuild American education around the television set? What’s a public school classroom but a broadcast audience in miniature? Surely, American educators missed a golden opportunity to boost the quality of children’s education by failing to creativly integrate TV into the schools.

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Similarly, did President Reagan--The Great Communicator--cheat our schoolchildren by not aggressively pushing for scholastic cable hookups and VCRs? Why not a VCR and a television per child so that educational programs can be individually customized? After all, VCRs are standardized and far less expensive than computers. What’s more, television, cable and VCRs are all “synergistic” technologies: they can run each other’s software. They offer America a cost-effective technical infrastructure for our schools, no?

Thinking people who care about children and know the sorry story of such technologies as television, calculators and language labs in the classroom would dismiss these historical hypotheticals as sheer nonsense. The idea that a telephone on every desk, a TV set in every classroom and a personal VCR for each child would have dramatically--or even incrementally--improved the level of elementary and high school education in this country is wishful thinking of the most destructive sort. It implies that the quality of education is predicated on the technological endowment of the school. That’s like saying good school textbooks have a bigger impact on a child’s education than good teachers. That may be true for a handful of students. However, school systems that celebrate the quality of their libraries and textbooks over the quality of their teachers, for example, are probably failing at providing a quality education for the bulk of their students.

What’s so striking--and so sad--is that the Internet Infatuees swear that, this time, it’s different. That--combined with the personal computer--the Internet will empower children to go to places they’ve never been, to link up with people all over the world, to tap into previously inaccessible resources etc., etc., etc.

Sorry--the Internet is just the latest technology that desperate educators, unhappy parents and pandering politicians have latched onto in hopes of avoiding the real problems confronting *

It is a fact--not an opinion--that American companies have wasted tens of billions of dollars investing in information technologies that have yielded no improvements in productivity or innovation. Why? Because many of these companies didn’t really understand either the impact of the technologies or how their organization would have to change to effectively use the technologies. The dirty, ugly little secret is that these companies have discovered that the root of their problems has little to do with technological competitiveness and everything to do with the way they managed themselves.

Similarly, the idea that Internet access is somehow an educational issue comparable to national standards, physical plant, classroom size, teacher quality, appropriate curricula and the ability to read represents an abdication of political leadership--not a visionary charisma. Indeed, the fact that our political leaders have made the Internet an educational issue shows how shallow our national conversation about education has become. Network technology is what you invest in after you have some idea of what you want an educational system to do and be--not before. Today’s Internet Infatuation is emblematic of a society that would rather buy tools than go through the painful process of figuring out how to use them.

Sure, it’s nice to have Internet access in the classroom--just like it’s nice to have outlets in the classroom where you can plug in projectors and other educational appliances. But just as quality of education in the past wasn’t dependent on electrical wall sockets, the quality of the educational future won’t be dependent on digital Internet sockets. To argue that it should displays both an ignorance of history and a dishonesty about the real challenges facing the schools. The Internet isn’t part of the solution; it’s part of the problem.