Are Schools Ready for the Net?

For a wide range of policy-makers, educators and well-meaning technology vendors, the idea of connecting the nation’s schools to the Internet has a great deal of appeal. President Clinton even jumped on the bandwagon with a speech in San Francisco last month in which he challenged “business and industry and local government throughout our country to make a commitment of time and resources so that by the year 2000, every classroom in America will be connected.”

This an admirable goal--the complaints of a few curmudgeons notwithstanding--and over the long-run it’s certainly feasible. But just as the introduction of personal computers in the classroom has been a rocky affair with uncertain benefits, the introduction of the Internet faces many obstacles--most of them non-technical in nature.

No one has much of a grasp on how education will be changed by the Net, or what reforms will be needed for the technology to be used effectively.

Two of the country’s leading experts on technology and education--Seymour Papert of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Alan Kay of Apple Computer--testified on this subject before a congressional committee the day before the President’s speech. Papert and Kay agreed that the present structure and mission of American public schools are at odds with the effective introduction of the Internet into classrooms.

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“We’re putting computers into a school system that was developed in an entirely different epoch,” Papert said. Kay testified that teachers will have to be transformed from conduits of facts into “guides” for self-teaching students.

Conservatives have embraced the notion of schools on the Net because of their frustration with educational bureaucracies. “What we need to do is shake [education] up,” said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), during the congressional hearing. Networking schools corresponds with conservatives’ desire to remake public education by encouraging parental involvement, cutting bureaucracy and ineffective teachers, and providing “choice” through vouchers for private school tuition.

But, ironically, giving students access to the Internet will undermine another of the conservatives’ primary goals for education: reinforcing local control of curriculum. Throughout the country, local fights over education have included intense disputes over curriculum content, what’s in school textbooks, and how certain subjects such as science and history are taught. If students have access to the Internet, all of these fights will become irrelevant.

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While schools may use “blocking” software to cut off access to pornography or other objectionable material, it will be impossible to block students’ access to the global marketplace of ideas, many of which will conflict with the principles and beliefs of local school boards. Schools’ “virtual” libraries will become as big and as diverse as cyberspace, and beyond the control of parents, educators, or administrators.

This is likely to result in local struggles over whether children should have access to the information and ideas on the Internet, and these arguments will stymie the introduction of the Net into many school districts. One can imagine a campaign by religious conservatives to keep school curricula tied to traditional textbooks, which can be reviewed and controlled, unlike the information on the Internet.

Even for those school districts that accept the President’s challenge and complete a connection to the Net for students, there are very few models available that show how the Internet can support K-12 education. Teachers trained with blackboards and film projectors will have to make an immense leap to use the Net effectively, and the potential for waste and folly is enormous.

Many teachers cannot explain how a computer works, let alone what goes into global telecommunications technology. Computers are the first educational tool that is typically mastered more quickly by students than by teachers, and this will be even more true of the Internet. How will teachers cope with kids who can run rings around them in cyberspace? How will parents judge whether their child is genuinely learning, or merely getting good at surfing the Net?

Finally, current network users, including parents, will have to contemplate what effects the introduction of tens of millions of children to the Internet will have on “Net culture.” When a few hundred thousand new users joined the Internet via America Online, the Internet was changed--for the worse, according to carping network veterans. Most of those new users were adults. There are nearly 800,000 children in the Los Angeles Unified School District alone. What will they bring to the Net?

The marvels of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and widespread hype about a future that will be entirely digital, lead many to believe that connecting “everything to everything”-- “how hard can that be?” asks an IBM ad--is merely a matter of wires and machines. But our brief experience with the Internet should tell us that we will inevitably drag our old, familiar social problems and institutions into cyberspace, where they may become even more vexing than before.