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Hey, this has been going on much longer than computers. They have just spread the "dumbing down" to subjects other than math. My rules on all technology for my kids were simple - Prove to me you know the concepts and you can use the tools. Grammar checkers and spellcheckers are no substitute for proofreading. Calculators cannot substitute for the multiplication tables. Learning to take tests is not learning. If you know the subject, the test will take care of itself.

Sounds simplistic, I know. But they have three Masters between them and they can both still find a square root without a calculator.

# posted by Phillip 12:09 AM

Bill's comment about music videos applies to the whole video medium. I'd still much rather read a book, and allow my imagination to supply the visual effects. I NEVER see a movie after reading the book, it's too disappointing.

# posted by Anonymous 5:16 AM

Whoa whoa whoa... let's not blame computers for this.

First, Hannity's "Man on the Street" and the thing Leno does have *nothing* to do with computers, and aren't even close to being actual studies. How many of those people used computers in school?

Second, computers aren't a replacement for actual learning. They're a tool to be used once you know what you're doing. They're not a replacement for a good teacher, a good textbook, and a good attitude.

Finally, kids are getting stupider because they're forced to learn for a test. I hated high school because it wasn't about finding what I was interested in, it was doing mind-numbing tasks to keep us out of trouble most of the day. I missed out on a lot of technology experience while I was wasting my time reading poems about cats and crap like that. Kids should be allowed to explore problems and careers.

# posted by Paul 6:00 AM

Want to read more about why computers don't belong in Schools and Libraries?

Try Cliff Stoll's books Silicon Snake Oil and High-tech Heretic.

# posted by Anonymous 6:57 AM

Oh Paul, do I have a bine to pick with you... '-)

You've mentioned what computers "should" be, not what the are. More often than not they end up as place holders to keep students' attention while hapless teachers try to figure out what they're actually there to do. (How the nuns did it for my 8th grade class with 51 students some forty one years ago is probably one of those "Act of God" things we read about.) You'll find the same problem in homes where computers are used as baby sitters rather than the tools you rightly say they should be.

As for the Hannity and Leno skits, they identify the intellectual quotient of the general population. Granted, there are other factors involved (during the Vietnam war, you could get an draft exemption by volunteering to teach in an inner city school and those slackards are still there), but the single most widespread change was the introduction of technology into the educational system. It's difficult to deny cause and effect.

# posted by Bill 8:10 AM

I feel like I'm hearing my grandma talking "in my time people knew how to write, read, count and geography before high-school". The fact is that school has changed a lot in the last 30 years, and so has what is asked from students.
Schools nowadays are teaching research, intuition and abstractions not knowledge. If computers make kids dump, how come children are learning to speak and count faster?

# posted by yanstor 8:52 AM

You people are missing the point 100%. Education that we know of today is basically the tattered remains of the industrial age. To transform farm workers (who woke up and worked at staggered times in their large multi-age family-run operations,) the industrial age instituted the concept of uniformity as a way of training new industrial age workers- this included standardized tests, bells that rang between each class to keep people moving and 100% on time, and a set belief that a modern day worker needed to know a certain level that would qualify them for life in the modern age. We created the assembly line, and we did that for our education system: you came in uneducated, you left knowing a certain level that qualified you as a graduate of high school with a standardized test score.

What you are seeing right now is an educational void and it is not the fault of the computer, but of the Technology Age leaders who have not bothered to figure out what they want their young populations to know. Because tech work was considered "white collar", it fell to the colleges to train these new elite workers, while the mainstream schooling was left with a major void in leadership- sometimes schools would toss in a computer, or add internet access, but with no plan for what skills would be needed or why, the computers are not of much use to a system that trains mostly service sector workers. If we now feel that service work doesn't demand much knowledge, and I guess it's ok to not know who the president is, or basic multiplcation, then again, that is not the fault of the computer but of the current education system in this country. A worker on an assembly line at Ford in the 1920s used to know more and could do more math than he probably ever needed to do his job, but it was because someone decided it was better to have a strong literate base of the population, than the ignorant and uneven farm workers a generation before.

Until somoene says the same with our current batch of schooling principles, the divide will grow so that the Harvard and MIT grads will get the high end tech training and science and everyone else will be left downloading porn and playing video games. I think it's a waste because from every person who went to scholl uniterested and saw the light and got to college and transformed this country is now a person who can slide out of the broken system illiterate, uneducated and with no drive or curiosity to seek any higher learning. No computer will fix that.

# posted by Anonymous 8:59 AM

Education is in a transition period right now, I would guess. And I'm not afraid of blaming teachers for a decline in the quality of learning in this country.

Long before the Internet infiltrated my school (I was a senior in High School when it happened) research was a pretty arduous task. If you wanted to write about, say, George Washington's cabinet, you had to read. A lot. Libraries and encyclopedias and periodic journals. And to find the information sought, you had to read most of the articles, or at least do some pretty thorough skimming.

To gather desired material, I inadvertantly learned other facts and information. (And really, isn't that the point of writing essays? Isn't that the point of assigned research?)

Today, all you have to do is go to Google, type in a few keywords, and look for the highlighted text in the results. Copy / Paste, change some formatting and words, and voila: An essay, with minimal learning and researching required.

That said, education will eventually strike a new balance. Students are no longer confined to the information available in their communities. Poorly funded libraries no longer limit students, and information is more current, and more diverse. Today, students have at their disposal the tools to produce very detailed, very fascinating essays and reports.

And that's where teachers come in. The bar has got to be raised, and expectations have got to be higher. If students are going to use the internet anyway, teachers have got to teach them the proper use, and the proper way to analyze information. And sources have got to be checked for plagerism. (Which I suspect is at an all time high.)

Now, regarding math and reading scores, again, this is a failure of teachers. Computers and calculators have no place in mathematics until students reach college. (And even then, not until 3rd-level calculus courses.) It's as simple as that. There is NO mathematics class taught in high school so sophisticated that students can't crunch the numbers on paper.

Literature, again, is obvious. Read classics. The type of reading and writing that students do online is completely different from academic-caliber material. They may be writing more, but they're writing differently. Email is the ebonics of the literary world, everyone falls prey to it. Because EVERYONE is online, our collective writing abilities are declining, and we no longer recognize crap when we see it. Teachers need to stay above the fray, and maintain an authoritarian eye for bad writing.

My guess is that we'll adapt and overcome, but it will take time, and a few more falls.

Dave

# posted by David 9:07 AM

The issue is a directionless education system with too few teachers and a mess of a curriculum. The computers are not a cause of this - if you took the computers out of the underperforming classrooms without changing anything else, results would not improve.

In this case, it's more like the education boards are just throwing equipment at the problem with out a plan. "The kids need to understand technology, so put a computer on every desk." And that's as far as it goes - no real plan for how the kids are actually going to learn on the computer. Presumably they're supposed to learn how to program or analyse data etc. by osmosis, under the theory that proximity to a computer makes you computer literate.

The computers are just a symptom of the root problem. This study looks like a poster child for "correlation does not indicate causation."

# posted by Anonymous 9:17 AM

You mean that the study isn't a valid indicator that throwing a gazillion more dollars at education in the form of computers hasn't helped? Or do you mean that there is a fundamental problem with the educational system that requires its dismantling and restructuring to bring about needed change?

Or are both true?

# posted by Bill 10:18 AM

A little from column A and a little from column B, but the computers in and of themselves are not the problem. You could have done the same study with metal detectors at the doors and gotten similar results, I'd bet.

# posted by Anonymous 10:41 AM

I agree. The void is in the system that seems to me anyway, largely directionless on what basics a student of today *needs* to know. In the 50's and possibly the 60s (a bit before my time so I am guessing) it seemed like that the average public school student got exposed to a certain pre-defined mix of math, music, science, art, some classics, basic grammar, history, physical education, and writing skills. When you left school you weren't a surgeon, but you had a pretty decent roll-up of those fundamentals under your belt. From there, students with more interest, money, and/or skill moved on to college and took on ever more detailed educational pursuits, or they moved into trade schools to train for careers in nursing, construction, car repair, etc.

What anyone in business will tell you is that when faced with having to make a budget cut, you start to look for things that can slip without killing off the whole operation. So some schools cut out music or art classes, food programs began to slip, science got more limited, advanced math dropped away, and so on. I don't care about the blame game right now, but the simple fact is that we have a swiss cheese mess now as a result, and what is missing for me anyway is someone willing to draw a line in the sand and say, "Enough. Here is what every student today needs to know as a minimum."

Maybe it won't include music, or art. Maybe it means basic addition and subtraction, or understanding interest compounded daily. All I am saying is that I don't get a sense of anyone in this country "owning" the bare mininum any longer, and that results in a vacuum with ever falling quality.

And I don't think it has to do with teacher salaries yet (my sister is a teacher and would probably shoot me) because you need to determine an end result first, then you find the teachers with the skills to get you there, and from that you decide on the right cost for their time. Until someone pulls up out of the swiss cheese, we're just going to be throwing money and computer at something that is basically directionless.

# posted by Alice 11:26 AM

Whoa, I am in high-school, taking it in a foreign language and in the most advanced math and physics section there. There is math that requires a calculator in high school. Not all books have the handy Sin Cos Tan tables in the back anymore, and much of the complex stuff does require a calculator. I challenge you to hop in a senior math class with a paper and pencil and see how you do. I had to do it almost all of my junior year (parents wouldn´t pay for the 85 dollar calc) and it was damn tough. I absolutely had to borrow a calculator for some tests and would have failed without one.

The other thing is, who cares if people use a calculator. They will never be without one again, and they might as well use their brain-power for something more important than finding the square root on a piece of paper [didn´t even know you could do that, prove it to me by find the root of 13, without guess and check :)]. You notice that 90% of kids can operate a VCR by the age of 2, and a computer by the age of 4, but they can´t read until 5 or 6. I give you that learning how to read is the most important thing that an education can give you, but beyond that, why must everyone know how to find the inverse of a parabolic equation on paper? 95% of people will never again use it, and you are completely wasting their time forcing them to. It does not give you a better chance at being a good business leader or machine operator.

Finally, if a kid isn´t on a computer, he will be in front of a TV, and thats not technology´s fault. If you are going to blame anyone, blame the parents, not overworked teachers who are given a bad curriculum to teach. There is no way in hell I will ever use 90% of the things I am learning in High School [which is why I transfered to Mexico, at least I could see a different culture while having my time wasted] and I resent the fact that I have to sit around there all day when I could be an apprentice to a skilled person in the career I want. High School, and math without calculators should be an option, not something forced on us.

# posted by Cyrus 11:31 AM

Cyrus,

Of course all this stuff can be done on paper - calculus was invented by Sir Isaac Newton in the 15th century, which last I checked was just a little before the invention of the solar powered calculator :-)

Seriously, though, the reason people need to learn this stuff is so they understand the underlying principle of why it works the way it does. Sure, most people don't use trigonometry every day, but if you're an engineer you may use it fairly often - and understanding it rather than just letting a computer (that was programmed by someone who DID understand it...) may give you insights into what is actually going on.

Also, how is someone who has the aptitude to become a programmer or a scientist going to realise that if they do not get exposed to the real, underlying knowledge? The same goes for music and painting (I'd hate to see those disappear just because someone thinks they don't contribute to the bottom line).

And, re: TV - that's valid at home, but the article concerns using PCs in the classroom, not on free time (free time is a whole other issue).

# posted by Anonymous 12:35 PM

Paul,
Don't be a tool. Stop finding the one weak link in an overall logical argument and then jamming your block-head into it and twisting. For anyone to cover EVERY possible scenario, point, and connect absolutely every dot for you would take pages and pages. Be reasonable. Reread the sentence that Bill typed before the Jaywalking paragrah:
"As we are a lazy race by nature, the more often that happens, the more often we'll expect it to happen, and the less we're able to use our minds the way they were meant to be used."
To me, this is a Very Clear illustration that he isn't claiming computers to be the problem, but are instead another tool that we use to further our own laziness. If you disagree with THAT, then argue THAT. As it stands, you didn't even begin to address THAT.

Cyrus,
If there's anything I learned in school it's that the kids who bitch about how when and how often they're going to "use this" tend to gain the least from school. If there's anything else I learned it's that the point is to teach you to learn, not to teach you so many specific facts to memorize. Maybe you're not going to need trig or calc in 5 years, but the ability to learn things that bloody complicated will DEFINITELY come in handy.

And in general,
Yes, I'm a bit cranky this afternoon. But the fact of the matter is that I've actually forgotten how to write cursive because I type. Do I actually WANT to write cursive? EVER? No, actually. Not at all. But it's still a loss. I'm actually have to really stop and think about multiplication sometimes, too. 6*7= .. fourty-something, I'm sure of it. 42? 49? I figure it out, but it's frustrating to think that I'm losing it already. It's not like I'm 80. I'm just lazy. By nature. And computers make that REALLY easy.

Preach it, Bill.

# posted by Terry 1:10 PM

Finding square roots of of numbers that aren't perfect squares without a calculator

1. Estimate - first, get as close as you can by finding two perfect square roots your number is between.

2. Divide - divide your number by one of those square roots.

3. Average - take the average of the result of step 2 and the root.

4. Use the result of step 3 to repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have a number that is accurate enough for you.

Example: Calculate the square root of 10 to 2 decimal places.

1. Find the two perfect square numbers it lies between.

Solution:
3^2 = 9 and 4^2 = 16, so it lies between 3 and 4.

2. Divide 10 by 3. 10/3 = 3.33 (you can round off your answer)

3. Average 3.33 and 3. (3.33 + 3)/2 = 3.1667

Repeat step 2: 10/3.1667 = 3.1579
Repeat step 3: Average 3.1579 and 3.1667. (3.1579 + 3.1667)/2 = 3.1623

Try the answer --> Is 3.1623 squared equal to 10? 3.1623 x 3.1623 = 10.0001

If this is accurate enough for you, you can stop! Otherwise, you can repeat steps 2 and 3.

Note: There are a number of ways to calculate square roots without a calculator. This is only one of them.
(http://www.math.com/students/calculators/source/square-root.htm)

BTW: The root of 13 = 3.605551275463989
(When I was i college, a reasonable calculator was $385. I used a LOT of paper.)

# posted by Bill 1:14 PM

As has been pointed out, mathematics was around before calculators and computers. I even had to do regression analysis without a calculator in college because not all could afford one.

After reading some of these posts, it should be obvious there is also a problem with over-reliance on spell checkers and grammar checkers. The spellchecker doesn't know there is a difference in words like to, too, and two. Grammar checkers are too rigid - they don't know there are times the rules might be broken. But you have to know when that is appropriate

I despised history and geography when I was in school. It did not make a bit of difference to the school board. We had to pass the classes to graduate. No standardised tests, just the ones made by the teacher. There were no social promotions. If you didn't know the material, you stayed until you did. It may not have been fair, but we had one of the best educational systems in the world, which can't be said now.

So, at the risk of dying in the conflagration, IMHO the reason for the decline is the societal drive for an average education. You cannot teach to the slowest student and expect the others to retain interest, particularly if there are no consequences for failure to perform or to maintain discipline.

# posted by Phillip 2:53 PM

That is guess and check Bill. Thats how I survived last year, there is no such thing as a math problem you can´t guess and check.

Terry, I don´t say throw math and all the rest out, I like to learn, and I enjoy math with a good teacher, I just think that the apprenticeship thing [like what we are doing :)] is a better option if a kid wants to take it. I know my concentration is excellent if I am engaged, but if I am not, I am terrible. I want the option to do like both Einstein and Edison did, and teach myself. Why does school have to be the set in stone method, why can´t we discuss alternatives, or at least out of the box changes to the system.

# posted by Cyrus 3:42 PM

"Guess and check" is also called proving a theory. It's a discipline of the mind. ;-)

# posted by Bill 3:46 PM

I love guess and check. Why learn the formulas when you can just do it with a bit more time, and less work?

# posted by Cyrus 3:55 PM

I think you have to take that study with a grain of salt. It's probably valid where for a given school, district or state, where some kids have computers, others don't. From what I've seen and read, it' a whole new ball game when all the students and all the teachers and all the staff each have their own lap tops. All wireless, all cross connected, all to take home and back.

This is coming to pass for seventh grade and up. Henrico county, just outside Richmond Virginia, for one, started doing this a few years ago.

The county bought, owned and, no charge, issued the lap tops to all. Sort of like proving free high school text books. Pay fifty bucks a year for insurance and you can take it home and back. When you graduate, it's yours.

The kids liked it, the teachers loved it. And once things settled down, even the parents were happy.

Oh, by the way, grades, and test scores, as a whole, went Up.

Same county, same school board, same admin, same school taxes, same schools, same kids, same teachers, same parents, same tests.

All samo-samo, except a year later, everyone, affluent or not so affulent, had a laptop, all wi-fi'ed to each other and to the teacher's lap top. The only difference was computer availabity for all. Oh, that and one other difference, test scores. Test scores got better.

When added to other positive school characteristics, computer availabilty was, repeat, was related to student performance, better student performance.

Not because of computer driven modules either. The laptops are just really handy little things when every one has one, cross connected and wireless.

Try a sanity check: your own computer is a Good Thing when you go off to college, a Bad Thing while still in high school? Does not compute.

Fuchs and Woessman's study, statistical analysis involving tens of thousands of students in 31 countries is all well and good if thats all you have to go on.

It's even better if you measure for a single group the one thing you're interested in, for this case student performance as measured by test scores. Change just the one thing you think might a difference,and only that one thing, For this case computer availability. Then a year later remeasure the overall student performance for the same students as measured by the same tests.

This kind of before and after comparison is usually pretty clear cut. The boys in the white lab coats call it a controlled experiment.

And if its just a Hawthorn effect, hey, whatever works.

Bill, you made your rep killing hype not adding to it. Negative hype is just as bad as positive hype. I hate to see you do a piece like this just for the sake of a really nice rant and some really dumb comments.

Want to give up your computer? It might do wonders for your penmanship and arithmetic (and some people, me, are lost when posting comments on a site with no spell-check, hint-hint).

Can't argue too much with HRH. Off hand, I can't think of any one who want to replace passion, skill and inspired teaching. or have a disproportionate amount of computer-driven modules.

I'm not so sure about your "admitted" decline of education though. Who's admitting it and based on what. The twenty year time series ACT scores in the education chapter of "Statistical Abstracts of The United States" doesn't look that bad. (US Census Bureau, on the weg, free pdf)

Thinking about music video's, visualize, conceptualize, envision...

The half-man, half-goat Greek god, Pan did pretty well with just music from a set of reed pipes. Boy, what images the ladies could invoke frrom it.

"When 'Omer smote his blooming lyre." he added a few words to help the boys create the images that the music evoked from it. Alas, no mp3, all we still have are the lyrics, the melody did not linger on.

A few hundred years later, Euripides went a bit further in "The Trojan Women." Not just a chorus and semi-chorus, also actors on a stage. Fiveteen hundred years Wagner really got carried away. Handsome actors and buxom actress singing lyrics, in costume, on a stage with elaborate sets. Talk about being channeled into a predefined visualization of the music's theme.

Dowm with MTV. Down with the Metropolitan Opera. My kids's mind is a terrible thing to waste, channeled into a predetermined visulation. Down with books. if you start reading books, your mind becomes a receptor rather than an originator. Down with cash registers, pocket calculators, computers. As we are a lazy race by nature, the more we use these machines, the less we're able to use our minds the way they were meant to be used. Why I even heard of one kid who ruined his mind staying all the time down in the celler, nursing a sugar/caffein jones with pepsi and playing Doom on his computer,

No, you're not a Luddite. You're just beginning to sound like an old *art. Some of the posters are worse. "Well in my day." Square roots by hand, trig tables. Bah Humbug. Strictly Amachoor. As soom
As you got to engineering school, you bought a Good slide rule: "Log Log Duplex DeciTrig," by golly, and never messed with long division or trig tables again. All of us would have given our eye teeth for a H-P or a T I calculator.

# posted by Anonymous 1:18 AM

Cyrus,

That is not "guess and check", it is iteration; convergence. Many functions are calculated in similar ways by...er...calculators - they don't have a simple formula, but are found by summing smaller and smaller terms until the error is sufficiently small.

If they did have a simple formula you could use it to calculate your square root on paper, for example!

# posted by Anonymous 1:34 AM

Cyrus,

When I was in High School, I felt the same way, believe me. I hated math. (It was a waste, etc.) There was a huge banner wrapped around the classroom with pi written on it. As an act of defiance to the math gods and my teacher, over the span of several weeks I stopped taking notes and spent my days memorizing pi. (To this day I still know pi to 40 digits.)

To amend what I said earlier, I think scientific calculators are fine in college calculus courses. (I meant that *graphing* calculators should be banned until the 3rd level. My apologies.)

But I do firmly believe that calculators should be banned in high schools. Enough sin and cos values can be printed on a table to make a sufficiently challenging test.

"When will I have to do this in real life without a calculator?" is an unacceptable excuse. By that logic, when will you need to know any facts at all? I mean, you'll always have Google nearby. How often will you need to know the year the Roman Empire fell? How often will you need to know what a split-infinitive is? How often will you need to know the atomic weight of cobalt?

Education isn't about turning out good drones in the work force. Just because architects don't need to know the works of Shakespeare doesn't mean they shouldn't study them. Education, especially higher learning, is about turning out well-rounded students of knowledge, with both the capacity for learning and the capability for applying knowledge creatively and competently.

Realistically, there's not much reason for somebody to know why Ada Lovelace is important. I just feel better that people do.

Hang in there, Cyrus. You'll agree with me one day. :-)

Dave

# posted by David 7:46 AM

Oh ye Todds of little faith... "Fuchs and Woessman's study, statistical analysis involving tens of thousands of students in 31 countries is all well and good if thats all you have to go on." If that's all you have to go on? We predict Persidential election results with samples smaller than 100... Your personal sample, while valid for you, doesn't make it statistical valid in contxt. It's the old, "Well that can't be true because I know someone who had just the opposite result..."

As for who says are education system is failing, well, I Googled "failing us educational system" and got 1,350,000 results. If just 10% of them are on point that's impressive.

You're cites of plays are irrelevant. They're visual presentations. Books evoke concepts, as do still images. Attention is a learned discipline. Thankfully, many of us didn't go to engineering school. Engineers (except for Charlie) can prove that bumble bees are incapable of flight.

# posted by Bill 1:36 PM

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