“So, how was it?” a friend of mine asked her daughter, as the girl got in the car after the first day at her new school. Knowing that such moments of adolescent transition can be tricky, the woman kept her tone light and her expectations low.
“Very different,” the girl said shortly. Then she smiled. “In a good way.”
“How so?” asked the relieved mother. She expected to hear her daughter talk about the nice teachers, or the friendly students, or maybe the hot lunch. But those considerations, improved though they may have been from middle school, were not what had made the girl’s first experience of high school so agreeable.
To her mother’s surprise, the girl said, “Mom, it was so great not having a laptop!”
“Until today,” the girl went on, “I didn’t realize what a drag it was to have a computer in class. I thought I was lucky that my old school made us use them. But now I realize that I was always so busy with it that I missed what was going on in front of me.”
The girl looked out the car window at the rain. Still smiling, she said, “It was such a pleasure to sit in class and just listen, and take notes with a pen.”
In that one day — in that one exchange, even — the girl put her finger on some of the central questions about the way we live now. In school and out of it, do computers enhance the human experience, or detract from it, or does it all balance out? Does life with technology have more savor than life without it, or is it the other way around? Does the dopamine fix we get from our screens compensate for the widely felt fracturing of our attention spans?
These are still open questions, and it is good that a teenager should reflect on them. Like the rest of her age cohort, my friend’s daughter can’t really remember a time without laptops and smart phones. Hers is one of the first generations to experience the fullness of the great national experiment in technological dependence upon which we are all embarked.
In the case of schools, the rush to put laptops in classrooms has produced, it seems, scanty results. “Schools are spending billions on technology … with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning,” said an article in last Saturday’s New York Times that discussed stagnant test scores at a tech-infatuated Arizona school.
It is interesting that, attending class without a laptop when she was accustomed to having one, the girl noticed an improvement not only in her own ability to follow what was being said, but also in everyone else’s participation. It is hardly surprising that a roomful of young people paying attention produces richer conversation than one filled with young people absorbed in their own screens.
“And another thing,” the girl pointed out with a laugh, as the car pulled into the driveway. “I wasn’t stressed the whole time about dropping or losing some expensive piece of equipment! There’s just a lot less pressure, with books.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
