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After decades of being beaten down by a series of curricular fads
and stingy funding, schools have now been offered their biggest
and most expensive promise ever—the miracle of computers
and the Internet, at a cost of approximately $70 billion. As attractive
as this change seems, whenever schools have tried to adopt the
latest tools of electronic technology— films, radio, then
television—it has caused mostly trouble. Computer technology
is proving to be no exception. By now, computers have transformed
nearly every corner of the academic world, from our efforts to
close the gaps between rich and poor, to our hopes for school
reform, to our basic methods of developing the imagination. The
promise of high technology is also upsetting the balance of power
in the relationships schools strike with the business community;
distorting public beliefs about the demands of tomorrow’s
working world; and reworking (and sometimes corrupting) the nation’s
systems for researching, testing, and evaluating academic achievement.
The totality of these changes have so deteriorated youngsters’
abilities to reason, to listen, to feel empathy, among many other
things, that we’ve created a new culture—of the flickering
mind. It is a generation teetering between two possible directions.
In one, youngsters have a chance to become confident masters of
the tools of their day, to better address the problems of tomorrow.
Alternatively, they can also become victims of commercial novelties
and narrow measures of ability, underscored by misplaced faith
in standardized testing. Computers and their attendant technologies
did not cause all of these problems, but they are quietly accelerating
them.
To assemble the compelling tales in this book,
Oppenheimer visited dozens of schools across the country—public
and private, urban and rural. He consulted with experts, read
volumes of studies, and came to strong and persuasive conclusions:
that the essentials of learning have been almost forgotten, and
that they matter much more than the novelties of technology. He
argues that every time we computerize a science class or shut
down a music program to pay for new hardware, we lose sight of
what our priorities should be—what he calls “enlightened
basics.”
Image: book cover, The
Flickering Mind. Art by Jamie Keenan.
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