The Tyranny of Technology

In a classroom of a flagship magnet school, a group of teachers were attending a staff development session meant to service teachers who planned to teach honors classes. Though the instructor had endless packets with graphs, studies, and charts debunking the myths of intellectual equality and reaffirming the bell curve, she had little to instruct beyond her packets. Like many mediocre instructors who conduct these insipid sessions for teachers, she peppered her lecture with hypothetical discussion questions that her packets would supposedly answer. In the beginning, she posed the banal educational inquiry, “What do you think students need today to succeed?” Teachers, more than anyone, will jump at the chance to participate in a class discussion; that’s why they become teachers after all. The first the first person to respond to this question was a middle aged woman who claimed to be a veteran teacher of over a decade. With a tone meant to rile up her fellow teachers for justice, she stated that, “Students today need technology! Students in schools that lack up-to-date technology will be at a huge disadvantage in our modern world!” This wasn’t the answer the instructor was looking for, but she readily endorsed this opinion and heaped further indoctrination that technology could save education today. The teachers that had any common sense held fast to the truths they knew in their heart, knowing that technology is a gimmick and a huge inhibition for students. Unfortunately, the majority of teachers internalized the garbage without a second thought.

For the past two decades, the push for technology has impoverished schools, intellectually as well as financially, but no one seems to notice. It has now become commonplace to think that a school will inevitably suffer without computers. Very few people seem to have the common sense to observe the notable absence of computers in schools of the past millennia and the continued progress of mankind. Newton could still invent calculus without a calculator from Texas Instruments. Voltaire could still satirize the most obscure instances in history without Wikipedia. Indeed, the works of difficult writers like Melville, Goethe, or Dickens, were read by whole populations of readers who had no access to a computer or SparkNotes.

Those with slightly more sense, though not much more, will continue to defend this norm of technology’s necessity with the statement that students have somehow changed mentally and biologically in their style of learning, and they now need computers to be engaged in the classroom. This reasoning satisfies that rationales of those still mystified with computers, internet, and cell phones, which constitutes a surprisingly large portion of teachers. However, for those familiar with these commonplace devices, this argument of cyborg children holds little weight. Computers do not physically alter a person’s biological composition; human brains are still human brains, so knowledge acquisition still remains a discipline. Although some desperately lazy minds (and their frustrated teachers) might desire it, machines will never think or learn for them.

Computers today will, however, successfully suspend thought like never before. While older generations might have used technology for practical functions like word processing and computation, the younger generations are now completely seduced by the computer’s impractical capabilities. Surfing the internet, playing videogames, or texting on the phone are ends in themselves rather than the means to constructive ends like producing an essay. Unless their livelihood depends on it, most people will use their computer for recreational purposes. Kids have learned to take this recreation to the extreme because adults foolishly let them. Young people are now prone to being completely distracted into their adult life because technology today tempts a person like never before. The unfortunate result that comes a lifetime of distraction is a fat lazy stupid person that can’t cope with reality. Hence, obesity, ignorance, and a need for foreign labor abound in the United States. The new generation does not learn differently; they are just much more unwilling to learn or practice discipline because of the incessant gratification that technology has granted them. A sad fate awaits this new generation if no one intervenes and stops their present lifestyle.

Schools can rightly claim the title of “learning environment” if they remove all temptations from students. Unfortunately, educators who demand more technology simply bring back those temptations. As soon as a student has access to internet he will immediately try to satisfy their vanity going to Myspace, or their lust by going to adult websites, or their laziness by going to game websites, or their immaturity by looking up an idiotic video or bad rap song. Every teacher who has taken his class to a computer lab will attest to this. Simply take away these temptations and students will be as bored with the computers as without. On the teaching end, the smart boards, ceiling projectors, and PowerPoint presentations, will engage the students just as well as a dry-erase board, an overhead projector and a few nifty posters. Thus, students will only show appreciation for technology when it leads to some kind of deviation from work or thinking. School should train kids to outgrow this kind of thinking, not encourage it.

Perhaps the last argument heard from technology advocates is that students must learn how to use computers in order to make it in this modern world imbued with technology. This argument has some validity but it must not consider computer literacy as an academic discipline in itself. Instead, computer literacy merely functions as a tool for already established academic disciplines. Like other tools, a person will learn to use it on their own if they need it for something. One can consider that nearly all adults in the United States use automobiles as a tool of getting places. When young adults feel the necessity to drive anywhere, they will learn how to drive on their own. They do all this without the help of school. Learning applications on a computer works out the same way. If the student needs to write something with a computer, they will teach themselves at home. Almost every person born in the age of personal computers has learned how to use computer applications. Only a miniscule amount of kids learn anything useful in a computer literacy classes apart from what they know already. Therefore, simply making an assignment that requires the use of computer with a one page manual (if necessary) would be the easiest way for a school to ensure a student’s competence with important computer applications. Unfortunately, today’s schools demand years of computer literacy classes that simply waste time and money.

The case against technology in schools does not arise from a Luddite fearful of a new invention, but from anyone who understands the functions of new inventions. In terms of education, technology has as little to offer to students trying to cultivate their minds as a supersized hamburger has to a person trying to lose weight.

Moreover, it’s expensive. Year after year, school districts will throw away money on computers that turn obsolete by the time they reach the schools. Then they will throw away money on expensive networks for these computers. Then they will purchase a firewall and anti-virus software (both of which are expensive but faulty) for those networks. Then they will purchase expensive “educational” software, half of which rarely see any use. Finally, they will create department of technology with multiple layers of bureaucracy to ensure some kind of maintenance of all these computers and networks. Naturally, technology consumes an ever-increasing portion of a district’s budget. All the while, basic maintenance for schools receives a diminishing fraction of that portion. As a result, more than a few teachers get to observe the quizzical contrast of working in a dilapidated school lacking decent plumbing or ventilation that is furnished with a brand new computer lab.

The continual descent of education in the past decades will show how many billions of dollars have been utterly wasted on this insidious gimmick. Districts need to stop seeing technology as some mystical solution to young people’s learning woes. To get to this point, teachers and parents in the district need to see technology as a tool for educated adults rather than a crutch for learning children. The middle age woman at the staff development meeting was painfully wrong. Students in the classroom do not need technology. They need to learn how to rely on their own brains, not computers, so they can thrive in this modern world.