Wel of geen computers in het klaslokaal?
Audrey Watters citeert in haar fantastische wekelijkse nieuwsbrief een interview uit 1985 met de computerwetenschapper Joseph Weizenbaum (bekend van ELIZA, een computerprogramma uit 1966 dat een therapeut nadeed). Weizenbaum krijgt de vraag of het goed zou zijn om computers in het klaslokaal te plaatsen. Hij vindt dat computers te vaak een oplossing zijn op zoek naar een probleem. Maar zelfs als ze zouden helpen om de schoolresultaten te verbeteren, dan nog vindt hij dat je eerst andere vragen moet stellen over waarom sommige leerlingen het moeilijk hebben:
There is a very good reason that questions of that kind are uncomfortable. When we ask this question, we may discover that Johnny is hungry when he comes to school, or that Johnny comes from a milieu in which reading is irrelevant to concrete problems or survival on the street — that is, there is no chance to read, it is a violent milieu, and so on.
You might discover that, and then you might ask the next question: “Why is it that Johnny comes to school hungry? Don’t we have school breakfast programs and lunch programs?” The answer to that might be, yes, we used to, but we don’t any more.
Why is there so much poverty in our world, in the United States, especially in the large cities? Why is it that classes are so large? Why is it that fully half the science and math teachers in the United States are underqualified and are operating on emergency certificates?
When you ask questions like that, you come upon some very important and very tragic facts about America. One of the things you would discover is that education has a very much lower priority in the United States than do a great many other things, most particularly the military.
It is much nicer, it is much more comfortable, to have some device, say the computer, with which to flood the schools, and then to sit back and say, “You see, we are doing something about it, we are helping,” than to confront ugly social realities.
Amen.