The NEW cure for educational woes

posted by jakevest on 16th, 2009

Just saw an item in the paper about “Virtual Education” and it pushed my button enough to make me take time I don’t have to push these keyboard buttons.

Children now have an educational resource that they can easily access to learn all the stuff that is being taught in school. The computer has come to the rescue with all sorts of programs that the little ones can click on and have a world of information there for the picking. That seems to tickle a lot of fancies but I don’t exactly see it as the most hopeful sign.

Children have ALWAYS had an educational resource that would allow them to learn the stuff that they would be taught in school. Books.

Instead of going to the public library, they watched cartoons. Before there were cartoons they sat under trees and stared at clouds or wandered around cow pastures or went fishing. Knowing there were 10,000 trillion useful words in a library did not get them educated.

Knowing that there are useful programs on computers won’t do it either.

That might be comparing oranges to Apple computers, so let’s try to close the similarity gap a little. Remember when they used to drag you to the library or the Bookmobile would come around and somebody forced you to go be amid learning? Did you check out a book on how to do multiplication or did you get a picture book? Were you spending your evenings with Jane Austen and geography, or did you diddle about looking at photos of rocket ships and planets, never bothering to read the captions?

Well, whatever kids did in the library, they’ll do on a computer. There must be a thousand programs out there that teach counting with a monkey carrying coconuts from one tree to another. If that monkey is entertaining enough, the kids will watch him….but usually only if they already know how to do the thing the monkey is doing.

So far, nobody has created a monkey interesting enough to sell clauses and parts of speech to children who weren’t in the market for them.

You turn a kid loose on a computer and that kid will find something more entertaining that what he was supposed to be doing…just like in a library. Those computer programs can be quite useful if you sit there with the student, direct them through the exercise, do most of the actual work and allow the child to enjoy the monkey and the coconuts, and the child will probably pick up some new things.

But that could have been done with pencil and paper.

The fact of this matter, as I see it, is that the kids who would have gotten this information in school, or would have come to school equipped with this information after having picked it up from their parents, are the kids who will get it from computers. The ones who won’t get it one way won’t get it the other way, either.

The answer is not brighter lights, louder sound effects or more vivid colors…it is attitude.

Computers won’t change that.