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North Opinion/Ruth Ann Baker: How many teachers would $2 million hire?
Wednesday, September 12, 2001
Last week, Quaker Valley School District took a great leap forward into the brave new digital world.
It'll be great if no one follows their lead.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania saw fit in February to select Quaker Valley as one of three school districts statewide to go completely digital. The accompanying $2 million grant means that a wireless network was installed in the Quaker Valley district's four buildings over the summer, that every teacher just acquired an Apple Titanium PowerBook G4 and that every pupil from third to 12th grade will soon receive his or her own laptop.
Moreover, the district will be sending technicians to the pupils' homes to install wireless equipment and high-speed cable Internet connections.
This experimental project is clearly a massive undertaking. It's exciting, it's whizbang, and it's not a very wise idea
Granted, computer literacy is a desirable part of anyone's education. But scarcely two decades have passed since the desktop computer's introduction in the mass market, and these days you can find and use them in virtually all schools and libraries, at self-serve businesses and in many private homes. It's now impossible, in fact, for students to finish their educations without achieving basic fluency in the use of computers.
So why this massive outlay of scarce public monies for superfluous digital doodads?
The two most critical components of a good education are both human. To produce students who desire knowledge, you need either a family or a teacher (and preferably both) to display an infectious love of learning.
A local school district cannot plant respect for education in the families it serves; it can simply foster whatever respect is there.
It can and must, however, hire and encourage the teachers who love learning and children.
Although there might exist children whose imaginations are sparked by machines, in general they respond to teachers who care about them. A dozen of these heroes to instruct, question, challenge, motivate and rebuke young minds will, over the years, teach those minds how to think critically and what to do with the information so diligently imparted.
The feel-good admonition "only connect" does not mean "get on the World Wide Web."
Until the student-to-teacher ratio drops to 10-to-one, I'd vote to spend money on more teachers every single time -- to choose messenger over medium.
Thirty years later, I can recall the name and face of every teacher I had in elementary school. Mr. Canton, my fifth-grade science and home room teacher who'd been born with only half of his left arm, tirelessly guided us through slide shows on the human digestive track and manned the pitching mound during a year's worth of kickball games.
The thing I remember most clearly from Mrs. Wright's fourth-grade class -- OK, besides the poster of her heart-throb Steve McQueen on the supply closet door -- is the palpable anticipation in the room every day as she pulled up her stool for story time. The year's best three books were "A Wrinkle in Time," an abridged "Robinson Crusoe" and "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" -- the last one in particular because Mrs. Wright's voice always sounded like she'd just eaten a chocolate bar.
With $2 million, Quaker Valley could have rented another building and hired, say, 100 more Mr. Cantons and Mrs. Wrights to shepherd its young charges. It could have extended both the school day and the school year if it really wanted to give the children a leg up.
It's the state's fault, of course, that the money was designated for digital technology and dispensed to only three districts with no discretion to second-guess the state's wisdom. Can you imagine the school district of your youth spending the equivalent of $2 million on slide rules?
No matter how sophisticated they are, today's laptops, like yesterday's slide rules, are still just tools. They're not knowledge.
One Quaker Valley teacher spoke excitedly of having all his students reading the same newspaper article or dissecting the same editorial cartoon via the computers on their desks. Yes, but you could accomplish the same thing with scissors and a photocopier.
And if three teachers, rather than one, were discussing the article or cartoon, with the original class now divided into three, each child would be more likely to have to speak and think and be challenged. To learn.
So far, the state hasn't promised to fund this program in future years. Given that computer equipment is obsolete before you get it out of the box, will Quaker Valley's experiment become a self-perpetuating expense? Will it forever limit the money available for what matters most?
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