In 1984 the administrators of my public school—I was in seventh grade—thought it would be a terrific idea if students were instructed in computers. The school had purchased a small roomful of these bulky machines—Commodore 64s, if I remember—and we were made to sit in front of them and tap out commands and listen to a nice man named Mr. Reed explain terms like “prompt” and “disk operating system.” It was a total waste of time and resources, but in 1984 it felt strange and important. Mr. Reed kept telling us that “in the future, everything will be done by computers, and if you don’t know how to use them, you’ll be left behind.”
My daughters returned to school this week, and I am reminded that the fear of a computerized future still haunts public education. These days, of course, students aren’t made to take classes on “computers,” if that’s still the term. They’re issued laptops.
When my oldest first brought home her laptop, I had questions. Why, I wondered, must we spend so much time and money getting kids to learn applications that will be replaced by others in a few years? In an age when nearly everybody laments our kids’ addiction to pixelated screens, why are we encouraging the addiction earlier than it might begin otherwise? I try very hard to avoid becoming the anti-technology crank dad who blathers on about how we didn’t have all these gadgets in my day. Really—I do. But in the six years since my oldest daughter brought home her first Dell, these machines have perplexed and provoked me to the point of despair.
When the schools first started handing them out, district officials told us how efficient and convenient these computers would make everything. And maybe that was true—for them. It’s not true for students and parents. The burden of keeping up with these beastly things is an endless source of woe. The laptops must be recharged, and school officials insist that they be recharged at home, not at school. Fair enough. Teachers don’t want kids fighting over outlets and losing charging cords. But what if you forget to remind your child to charge her laptop and it’s time to go to school and the battery is at 4 percent? Your morning becomes a tragic scene of weeping and recrimination, that’s what.
The sheer weight of the things is a nuisance, too. One of the original reasons for issuing laptops to schoolchildren was that it would make all those weighty textbooks unnecessary. In practice, most of the textbooks are still necessary, as are the notebooks and pens and pencils associated with former stages of human development. The result is that my daughters’ backpacks are four or five pounds heavier than the ordinary book-laden backpack. I’m a strong guy, but these girls’ bags feel like a Marine’s battle gear. Last year my middle daughter experienced persistent neck pain that nearly stopped her from playing the violin.
The girls tell me that games are—air quotes—“prohibited” on their laptops. But most of the students know how to get around the blocks and look at whatever they want to online. I’m told on good authority that kids play supposedly proscribed games and read celebrity news in class. If I were the father of boys, which I am not, I would worry less about games and celeb news than, let’s say, other things.
Laptops are also prone to a host of vulnerabilities that never afflicted notebooks and pens. They malfunction, they get viruses, they’re stolen, their screens crack when they’re dropped, they lose keys on the keypad. When that happens the student has to enter the complicated and time-consuming process of having them repaired or replaced.
Then there’s the problem of transmission. Students these days mostly don’t turn in their homework by bringing papers to class—so primitive! They upload it the night before. That word “upload” sounds easy and efficient, but so many things go wrong. The Internet goes down just as the midnight deadline passes, a crucial password suddenly doesn’t work, the upload doesn’t “take” somehow and the teacher never receives it. It’s as if that mythical dog that used to get blamed for eating kids’ homework has sprung to life online and roams the world devouring the stuff.
It’s still unclear to me why our local district spends gobs of allegedly precious state money on machines that cause vastly more problems than they solve. Usually these decisions are born of bureaucratic envy—the neighboring district got them so we have to get them, too. So it goes. At least my kids won’t be left behind.
