Surveys show computers can damage preschool, grade school students

(Part I)

If your preschools or elementary schools have no desktop computer you must be wondering whether you are shortchanging your children’s education and their future. NOT AT ALL – for the six- to 12-year olds’ intelligence, emotions and physical capacity are mobilized dynamically by Mother Nature to make them independent and responsible.

Their “built-in computer” or growing brain, senses, and heart, when substituted with an artificial intelligence, will be greatly harmed. Jane M. Healy, PhD, once a bedazzled enthusiast of educational computing, is now a troubled skeptic after observing various low to high budget preschools, grade schools and high schools, as well as interviewing principals, parents, teachers and students all over the United States on a Federal State grant. Her book “Failure to Connect” summarized these findings and is dedicated “...to my mother, who understood nothing about computers but a lot about living successfully as a human being...”

Blundering into the future

In the early nineties, while DECS Secretary Sid Cariño and Dr. Armand Fabella were unstoppable in building the missing 11,000 classrooms for public elementary schools, and approximately the same number for public high schools, DECS Secretary Gloria, in his time, persisted in providing computers to as many public schools as possible. I thought this “computer crusade” was quite misdirected and would raise false hopes as an instant remedy to make up for ineffective teaching. The more realistic solution was raising the quality of teacher development programs and updating the Philippine curriculum. In 1990, the EDCOM (Senate-Congress Education Commission) national survey of Philippine schools in all levels recommended the urgency of raising the fallen standard of the Philippine system of Basic Education.

Parents, teachers, and professionals were carried away as well by the “computer hype.” The fashionable shopping malls frequented by all classes of people became beehives of computer hardware and software. Education conference halls all over the world and in our country were ringed with expensive computer technology come-ons, raising hopes on the “new” learning technology.

In 1995, the American Association of School Administrations published the results of a survey that asked parents, teachers, and leaders from various fields what skills would be important. In a list of 16 possibilities, computer skills ranked third, outvoted by “basic skills” and “good work habits.” “Good citizenship” and curiously “love for learning” were very much down the list with “history and geography,” as well as “classic works (e.g. Plato, Shakespeare).” Thus, computer skills were deemed more important than values of honesty, tolerance, etc. In the past two decades, computers have so distracted the learning world while creating a culture without moral foundation.

Toddler to teen technology

An atmosphere of hysteria surrounds the rush to connect even preschool to electronic brains. Of the 10 best-selling children’s CD-ROM titles sold in 1996, four were marketed for children beginning at age three. Even infants as young as 18 months have been given similar provisions. This “push toward electronic precocity” continues to astonish and amuse the more discriminating European and Japanese educators.

In 1995, a seminar of knowledgeable academics concluded that computers have no place at all in the lives of young children. In 1997, Samuel Sava, head of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, told school leaders that computers have done little to improve student achievement and questioned the American government’s spending up to $20 billion a year to fill schools with computers.

A major problem was that few knew how to support their child’s use of the technology and allowed children unlimited and unsupervised computer use. The one thing parents feared was too much time with computer games. Some of the youngsters even incorporated schemes by which they could quickly punch some keys to substitute a page of text from the computer encyclopedia into their reports. Initially, this scheme fooled me as well when some under-achieving students in our professional high school submitted reports complete with graphics, surpassing those submitted by my honor students.

Home computer analysts Julian Sefton-Green and David Buckingham from the University of London concluded that children and teens need close adult mentoring and well-defined educational projects to make their technology use constructive.

A peek into a grade school computer lab

Notching higher in quality are the recognized private grade schools where teachers can speak English more confidently and a computer laboratory for individuals or small groups of students must be available.

The students are now brought into that marvelous computer world with one click and presto! You have the information right in front of your eyes in the computer screen. If the student wants to research about animals in Africa, all she has to do is go to a specific website and she gets the information without having to look for the book in the library.

If one has to locate a place in South America, a student does not have to look for it in a map, but merely use the “mouse” to pinpoint the place. With another click the continent is magnified on the screen. Or by merely typing the name of the town or city, voila, one can locate it without even the use of magnifying glass to scan a regular geography globe or flat map.

In Math, the skills of numeration and the memorization of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tables will not matter. The computer given the formula can easily solve the Math or Chemistry problem.

Computers will not allow the child to solve the math problems using his own logic and practical reasoning. It will not give the child a chance to browse through the books in the library and learn that the library has a system in order to find the books in it. It will not teach the child to spell the word correctly because it does it for him in an instant, neither will it encourage the child to draw creatively from his own imagination because it has a storage of drawings and pictures which can be used in completing class projects.

Fools of our tools

In almost every conversation I have had with either parents or educators about technology, this phrase arises: “But it’s only a tool.” This is intended to demystify the science of computers. Tools are subordinate to humans. Unlike crayons or hammers, which have no direct effect on our kids’ minds, we have much to worry about computers.

First, studies demonstrate that people react to and treat computers, no matter what their software, as more “human” than machine.

Second, the minute we add software, we are subject to objectives, knowledge base, interest and the biases – recognized or not – of the programmers.

Third, teachers are confronting the need to re-evaluate their customary criteria in grading papers when masses of information can be downloaded, complete with graphics, spruced up with elaborate formats and typefaces, and presented as the result of “research”– a form of cheating no less.

Fourth, the very availability of spell-check programs and calculators calls into question how much time is spent teaching “basic skills,” such as spelling and arithmetic, as well as how actually to go about it.

Fifth, drawing or designing by computer likewise changes the task demands – the mental skills required – from doing the same work by hand, not making full use of the child’s rich imagination.

Sixth, “The computer requires almost no physical interaction or dexterity, beyond the ability to type. You subjugate your own thinking patterns to those of the computer. Using this ‘tool’ alters our thinking process.”

Seventh, by depending on a computer when confronted with a problem, we limit our ability to recognize other solutions, and ultimately degrade our own thinking powers.

Success lies beyond IQ

In his book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Daniel Goleman warned of a dramatic drop in “emotional competence” in the past two decades. Other psychologists have called this an “emotional deficiency disease.” Between the mid 1970s and late 1980s, American children on average had gone down on 40 indicators of emotional and social wellbeing. These findings were worrisome since Goleman found that IQ, or tested intelligence, contributes only about 20 percent to financial and personal success of adult. The rest were highly dependent on social-emotional abilities.

Psychologist Robert Coles notes that today’s culture has been neglecting important personal values. “Many of our children today are in great need of adult guidance [‘moral companionship’ in Cole’s words], but no one seems to have time to give it to them. Thus, they lack the ability to be morally introspective and to reflect on one’s own values. Many of today’s youngsters reflect more on the video display terminal than muse about themselves.”

Given these alarming observations and findings on the effect of unlimited, unsupervised usage of electronic gadgets [like computers, laptops, tablets, e-books, mobile phones and others] on our children’s values, shall we not proactively curb their exposure? Shall we still consider these modern gadgets advantageous?

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