Saturday, October 17, 1998

If kids learn differently by
using computers, so be it.
The alphabet revolutionized
education, too.

By Philip J. Bossert
Special to the Star-Bulletin

I am so tired of hearing the mono-mediate elders of our educational institutions drone on about the evils of technologies other than books.

A Boston Globe article, printed in the Star-Bulletin Oct. 6, serves up yet another of these dubious "warnings."

It quotes researchers, including educational psychologist Jane Healy, who fear children's early use of computers can result in short attention spans and the need for instant gratification. She warns that long hours spent alone on the computer can undercut brain development, intrude on social and emotional advancement, and put a child's health at risk.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to Healy for the insight she has given us that the media we interact with -- in seeking information and entertainment -- have an impact on both our perceptual consciousness and our physical brain.

I have served on public panels with Healy (I'm the "bad guy" who let his 2-year-old use a Mac whenever she wanted to and Jane is the "good gal" trying to protect our children from brain damage) and we both agree on the importance of her findings: If you spend most of your time reading books, your brain will evolve differently than it will if you spend most of your time surfing the net.

Where we part company is at the conclusions to draw from this fact.

Healy wants to keep our kids away from TV and computers, and get them into books and nature walks, so that they will be able to learn effectively in our schools. I want to change the way our schools educate, so that it conforms more with the way children live and learn in today's world.

This uproar has all happened before, mind you. The Greeks were aghast at the idea of introducing the technologies of reading and writing into the curriculum of their time. In a passage from one of his famous "Dialogues," the Phadrus, Plato quotes Socrates saying, "The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external characters and not remember of themselves."

Greek students were supposed to remember what they had heard as they sat around listening to learned teachers who held forth in the schools of that time. And indeed they could remember, because this type of education resulted in the development of exceptional mnemonic skills.

An educated Greek could likely recite a two- or three-hour poem or play from memory. Socrates was afraid that being able to write things down and read them later would dumb down the whole process and make people mentally lazy.

Socrates lost, of course, and reading and writing won the day. But he was also right; most of us today cannot remember our Social Security number much less recite

a two-hour poem from memory.

The whole debate repeated itself when printing made books cheap enough for every student to have one of his own ("his" because women were not allowed scholarly pursuits in those benighted days).

The medieval teachers who spent their days reading books to classes of students -- it was called "lecturing" -- were horrified at the idea of students independently reading books and coming up with their own interpretations and ideas. They fought the introduction of textbooks into the schools. But they too lost.

Deja vu once again

And so here we are today doing it all over again. Fighting the introduction of new multi-media technologies into our mono-media schools. Children enter the world seeing, smelling, touching, hearing, talking. They are multi-mediate beings and exist, for the most part, in a rich multi-media world until they enter schools that are still worried about whether there are enough 15-year-old textbooks to go around.

Under normal circumstances, these kids would be dumbed down to the normal mono-mediate literacy level that characterizes most adults in our society. Computers and television in general and the Internet in particular are threatening this status quo. These electronic devices are corrupting the youth of this generation. We are doomed!

I agree with Professor Douglas Sloan, quoted in the Globe article, that parents who force 4- and 5-year-old kids to sit at computers for hours on end are damaging their kids -- "compromising their social development and imagination."

It is just that I don't know any parents who do that. Most of the kids my daughter's age (5) get bored with computers at about the same rate that they get bored with any other task. Their minds are working too fast absorbing their environments and they cannot be bothered with spending too much time on one task.

But, when Sloan goes on to say that kids who use computers are "being provided with someone else's visual images at precisely the time when they need to be developing their own image-making capacities," I have to wonder what type of children's books he would recommend for 2- to 8-year-olds, since all of the ones I've seen are loaded with visual images.

Perhaps he would suggest starting the mono-mediate conversion pro-cess earlier than first grade by having parents read their 2-year-olds to sleep at night from an image-free edition of the collected works of Shakespeare.

And high school history teacher Bill Schechter -- although recognizing the value of the Internet as a research tool -- says that students need to get off the net and check their facts in some books.

Right! After watching the impact of a Jupiter probe in real time on the NASA web site, let's drag out that 10-year-old astronomy book in the library and check our facts.

The Encyclopedia Britannica (EB) is published in print about once in 10 years. The EB CD-ROM is updated and published once each year. But the EB web site is updated every day!

The information content of most books is two to three years old by the time it is published. By the time a book makes it through the maze of educational textbook and library book selection committees, it is another two to three years out of date.

Granted, some facts and their interpretations do not change, and so books are a good technology for storing and displaying them. I am not against books; just for appropriate technologies.

Faulting it because it's fun

I could not tell whether it was the author of the article or another of her cited experts, Vicki O'Day of Xerox PARC, who suggests that, "Parents should restrict the computer to what's useful and forget about what's entertaining."

How about applying that strategy to other technologies -- books, games, films, television, etc. -- as well. No trouble finding someone to play Scrooge in the Christmas play this year! And we wouldn't be troubled by "useless subjects" like literature, art, sports and the like in the school curricula.

All of the research on education -- all of it! -- acknowledges that play is an integral part of learning. And play is inherently entertaining, whether it is playing with a ball, with words, with numbers, with ideas or with other kids.

Books are devices composed of paper, ink, glue and string which enable print and image technologies to display, transport and store information and/or data. Sometimes printed materials contain nonsense and disinformation, as any supermarket tabloid makes evident. And sometimes computers and networks serve up nonsensical and disinformative content.

Is there electronic trash on the Internet? You bet. Is there print trash in most bookstores and supermarkets? You bet.

The real issue here is that my daughter and her peers are going to live and work in a world that is infused with interactive, multi-media information systems, not in a mono-mediate world dominated by print and broadcast technologies that Jane Healy, Douglas Sloan and I grew up in.

My daughter needs to become multi-media literate if she is to function effectively in her lifetime and avoid having her perception seduced by slick, million-dollar-a-minute ads for products and politicians.

So my wife and I read with her (and talk about what we are reading), watch TV with her (and talk about what we are watching), and log onto the computer with her (and talk about what we are doing and seeing). And she also enjoys doing all of these things by herself without comment from the old fogies!

Computers still scare us

In his recent book, "Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation," Don Tapscott asks an interesting question: "Why is it we say a child who sits and reads for two or three hours at a stretch is a 'voracious reader' but a child who interacts with the net for two or three hours is 'addicted to the Internet?'"

For the most part it is because we don't understand these new technologies and we are threatened by them, so we use negative terms to describe behavior associated with them.

Many teachers, and especially many senior professors of education, don't want to have to change their mono-mediate teaching ways this late in life. It is just much easier -- and less expensive -- for schools to force this generation to suffer through the same curricula that we all endured throughout our educational experiences.

I'll side instead with educational futurist David Thornburg when he cautions parents and teachers to think whether they are preparing children for our past or for their future.

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Philip J. Bossert is president of Strategic Information
Solutions Inc., a computer networking company, and is a former assistant
superintendent of the Department of Education.