Computers Make School Kids Dumber?

That’s the contention from a study done by Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Woessmann of the CESifo economic research organization in Munich using the test performance and background data from the 2000 PISA study involving tens of thousands of students in 31 countries. “Students who use computers a lot at school have worse maths and reading performance, research suggests. Those using computers several times a week performed “sizeably and statistically significantly worse” than those who used them less often.”

Don’t take their word for it. Alice’s old buddy, Prince Charles, last week said, “I simply do not believe that passion for subject or skill, combined with inspiring teaching, can be replaced by computer-driven modules, which seem to occupy a disproportionate amount of current practice.”

I’m guessing that HRH knows his stuff. If you track the admitted decline of education, you’ll probably notice that it follows along with the increase of technology in the classroom. If you’re about to say, “That doesn’t make any sense,” all I can reply is, “Hold on thar, Baba-louie!” The mind really is a terrible thing to waste and when you don’t exercise it properly it doesn’t work as well as it should. You need to be able visualize, conceptualize, envision… Technology does all of that for you, to a greater and greater degree as time goes by. Think about music videos. No, it’s not far-fetched. Before, when you listened to music, your mind created the images that the music evoked from it. Now, you’re channeled into a predefined visualization of the music’s theme. You’ve been basically taken out of the picture. Your mind becomes a receptor rather than an originator. 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.

Untrue speculation? If you’ve ever watched the “Jay Walking” segments on the Tonight Show or listened to Sean Hannity’s Thursday “Man on the Street” interviews, you probably already realize that something’s wrong.

What have all these studies been that claim the exact opposite, you wonder? Let the authors be your guide: “Fuchs and Woessmann found that the more computers there were in students’ homes, the better their test performance. But more computers went with more affluent, better-educated families. So they took this into account in the statistical analysis. In schools, they found students performed worse in those which reported a significant lack of computers. But again, once they took into account the schools’ general resources the same pattern emerged. That is, the initial positive pattern on computer availability at school simply reflects that schools with better computer availability also feature other positive school characteristics. Once these were taken into account, computer availability was not related to student performance.” Duh…

Believe it or don’t. It’s only the future.