As one specific example of the intellectual damage done by computers, the math skills of today’s college graduates are inferior to those of students from 20 years ago (and inferior to the skills of students educated in India and China today.) For the last 10 years, I have been involved in recruiting engineers from some of the best schools in the country. Just as calculators enabled many of my peers to avoid learning basic arithmetic, computers have enabled even engineers to avoid learning advanced math. The loss is not that the students can’t plot points on log-log paper but that their brain never had to figure it out because they could automate their homework without learning how to do it. I’ve seen honors students stumped by the #value# error Excel gives them for trying to force the scale on their graph to be zero.

Computers are a tool for doing something faster than it can be done with a pencil and a piece of paper. Giving them to kids does not improve their ability to think, solve problems or write. More work is needed to develop software and train teachers to use them before we spend a few hundred billion dollars on laptops for children.

I like the “if we build it they will come analogy.” If we build it, they won’t be able to find it with both hands and a flashlight.

It seems to me that getting the content for the textbooks on all the necessary subjects would be at least as difficult as creating the technology for the computer.

I agree that the laptops *could* be very valuable teaching tools, but I think there needs to be more of a focus on the software and content. Right now I think there just just kind of a “if we build it, they will come” approach. This approach doesn’t seem to have worked in the US, so I don’t know that it will work elsewhere.