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iSchool? Why There's No Technological Fix to Ailing Education
iPads for Kindergartners is Not a Good Idea
At a recent conference, I met a woman who was ecstatic about the new Auburn, Maine program which is providing all Kindergartners with iPads. At first, I thought she was joking. While the goal sounds positive – to better teach these children so they will more easily and readily learn their letters in a district where approximately 40% of third graders have not achieved literacy standards – after watching some news reports and reading some articles about the program, I found myself quite troubled. 
In a local TV news report, an official enthusiastic about the plan gushed, “Kindergartners who had struggled all year to learn their ABCs are now breezing through the alphabet.” Another said that it’s “absolutely something we must do.” Angus King, the former Maine governor who launched Maine’s laptop program, praised the idea recently in the Huffington Post, saying the idea of iPads in Kindergarten wowed him. “Anything that holds the attention of pupils will help in the learning process… If your students are engaged, you can teach them anything…. If they're bored and looking out the window, you can be Socrates and you're not going to teach them anything. These devices are engaging.” And although we all may be hopeful that new technologies can deliver solutions to current problems, is this widespread and unexamined faith truly warranted?
While I have admired Angus King, it’s disturbing to think that the answer to bored kindergartners is iPads. As I've written previously, it's a travesty that we ever bore our students. Bored five-year-olds should be an oxymoron. Such is the combination of the curiosity of kindergartners and a long-standing tradition of fun, vital, vibrant, and playful kindergarten classrooms, that one actually has to make an effort to bore them.
Many kindergartners are indeed struggling to learn their letters and read, but this is because many of them are not yet - developmently speaking - ready to read. There is much evidence that pushing them to read before they are ready is actually harmful, leads to lower achievement and later learning problems. While some children (and I was one of them) are ready to read in kindergarten, others (like my son and many of his friends from school) are not. Deciding to teach every kindergartner to learn the alphabet and read is setting many up for failure, boredom, diminished self-worth, attention difficulties, and rejection of schooling and perhaps even learning.
Instead of rushing to use technology with five-year-olds, we must first seek to understand why so many children are struggling to read at a standard proficiency by grade three. Is it a failure of technology, a failure of teaching and schools, a side effect of other variables (perhaps too many computer games and too much TV watching), a combination of these, or something else entirely?
For generations, we’ve learned to read without computers. Our literacy rates were quite high in the 1950s, when children didn’t learn to read until first grade and there were no iPads. To turn to new technologies to address a wider, systemic problem may be completely missing the mark.
Anyone paying attention to teenagers in the developed world these days knows that they are, by and large, addicted to their technologies. They are simultaneously on Facebook, texting, watching YouTube videos, listening to iPods, and doing their homework. They cannot seem to control their impulse to respond to every vibration, chirp, or ringtone on their smart phones, even for such modest periods of time as a 10-minute car ride. Many are so absorbed in their technologies that they struggle with interpersonal conversation, and will not even respond when greeted or prompted. Do we want to “addict” our children to such technologies at an even younger age?
There is no question that computers are a tremendous and powerful vehicle for learning, but I do not believe that kindergarten is the right time for their classroom use. Kindergarten should remain a time to cultivate children’s goodness, nurture their innate curiosity, and feed their passion for learning and creating. It’s a perfect time to sow the seeds of cooperation, encourage social participation and to discover the fundamentals of a good life: finding joy in learning; being part of a group while growing as an individual; being kind and generous; and exploring the outdoors through our senses by digging, climbing, tending gardens, building treehouses and huts, sledding down hills (and climbing back up), and just quietly observing the world around them.
One official in the news report mentioned above pointed to finger-painting as one of the computer apps available to the Auburn children. Isn’t finger-painting – one of those joyful, creative, tactical experiences of childhood – meant to be done with gooey, smooth, bright paints using all ten fingers on moistened, glistening paper? What on earth is the point of a finger-painting app for kindergartners?
The cost to provide the iPad 2 to 285 students and teachers has been estimated at $200,000. In the Bangor Daily News we learn that the iPads will be used for 30 minutes twice each week or about 40 hours for the school year. Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money for 40 hours on a iPad. Is this a good use of very limited school funds?
Auburn, Maine is just the beginning. Plans are afoot to provide iPads to kindergartners in a number of other states as well. We need a better plan for our children than this. With $200,000, the Auburn school district could have hired four new teachers, perhaps introducing humane education into the curriculum so that students could learn how to become solutionaries for a better world. That might make a real difference for our children and the world. And, while we're at it, maybe even a little finger paint.
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13 Comments so far
Show AllI'm not a parent, and as it happens I haven't socialized with new parents in quite some time.
So is it still customary to install colorful, attractive, cheerful mobiles on cribs?
Or has Apple or some other much-renowned computer equipment company marketed an iMobile to render traditional crib mobiles obsolete?
It seems to me that one of the chief characteristics of technobarbaric cultures like Amerika's is that it worships "state-of-the-art" or "cutting-edge" technological devices as an article of faith.
Computer technology is to this century what internal-combustion engine technology was to the previous century.
Good luck in the attempt to tame, or even challenge, the ruling zeitgeist that pervasively and subliminally urges all right-thinking people to believe that computers and their accessories are practical necessities that can only make life better.
And take for granted the corollary belief that computer technology is limitless, even universal, in its applications.
I find utterly creepy those ads for "Droid" smartphones and services that ostensibly "whimsically" portray hip yuppie-types (or whatever they're called these days) morphing into electronic devices. And other ads in which human actors portray personifications of portable computer devices and services.
Alas! the Technobarbarian Child is the father of the Technobarbarian Man-- and now, vice-versa. So iSchools perforce arise to make the creepy images in those glitzy teevee ads the New Normal.
But time-serving educators, enthusiastic corporate partners, and parents and grandparents thrilled to brag about how their kindergarteners are a "whip" on the computers would surely be insulted or offended at the accusation that they are an ad hoc committee of Doctor Frankensteins.
Speaking of technology - why is it the post by Obedient Servant (before this one) is shown on my screen as a long, thin white line? Is it my computer or is this something new (at least I've never seen it before)?
FYI, lord_buckley, I'm responsible for the 5:14pm "thin white line".
It occurred because I accidently re-posted the 5:12pm comment at 5:14pm. So I deleted the duplicated text. Once is plenty!
But since one can't delete the comment entirely, the empty comment box displays as that mysterious "white line". I guess I should've put "deleted" in there instead of leaving it blank. Sorry about that!
If they're bored and looking out the window, you can be Socrates and you're not going to teach them anything
Ah Socrates...I think they would NOT be looking out the window in the presence of Socrates. Engaged, challenged, intrigued, frustrated, impatient perhaps but NOT bored. But Socrates was executed for corrupting youth....it seems there never has been a time when it was desirable to encourage the young to think, question, differentiate fact from opinion to be informed consumers of information as well as goods and services. An iPad at the age of 5? Well I do seem to remember an abacus or two in my class when I was 5, high tech eh? There were 40 of us in first grade. And now that I come to think of it we did indeed use 'digital' technology, we counted on our fingers. Oh for goodness sake just put interested motivated teachers in the flippin classrooms and let them get on with it in a 'testless' environment.
Agreed! Abolish the Dept of Education!
I don't see that this altogether agrees with the above. Perhaps I am reading something in to your response that I should not, but I hope the following impressions might be of use to someone.
One might imagine that since people are curious, we would investigate adequately with no institutional support. We don't: the relative disuse of informational tools stops their ready availability to those that would use them, so that even those who learn better outside of schools have only an impoverished opportunity to do so. We need an environment that involves free exploration, but also rich social circumstances and rich access to information.
Some people homeschool well, but most parents do not represent their childrens' interests better than do those childrens' instructors, despite their frequently authentic passion to do so: in parent-teacher meetings, it is generally the parents who insist that curricula be limited to "reading, writing, and 'rithmetic," whereas teachers and administrators, perhaps for their greater practical experience, generally recognize the need for varied programs and interactive learning, even when those same teachers may remain too awkward or self-involved or idea-bound or too self-defensive of parent or institutional criticisms to administer these well.
I myself teach at colleges and universities, not of K-12. But a good part of the reason that I like that is that I rarely have to deal with students' parents, and the administrators that I do talk to do not have to tailor a curriculum to a least-common-denominator or even most-conservative-possible-parent standard of legitimacy of information.
Rather than remove the institutions involved in education, rather than de-fund them, why not fund them anew and reform them? Otherwise, let's discuss with what to replace them.
our educational direction needs to move toward the outside world, not further inside our minds...while one can claim iPads, etc., open vistas of exploration, they also waste hours of time in meaningless surfing, or repetitive gaming that achieves little but momentary success in trivial arenas...
what we are missing, as always, is a goal that has meaning...a goal greater than earning an income...
without such a goal, boredom should be no surprise, at all...
these seductive devices are our ultimate challenge, as their very manufacture, not to mention their use, is detrimental to the living world...
whether we are able to overcome our fascination with such things may be that upon which our entire future hangs...
one would never attempt to argue we can't live without them, would one?
not even though they are the only thing to come along that has surpassed the car for identity...
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And, while people worry about pushers hanging around the school gates to hook children on drugs, alcohol, tobacco, this kind of thing attracts idealistic parents as advocates.
Same principle. My 'significant other''s school recently identified itself as a "Microsoft School". For this, they get a bunch of computers. And Microsoft get hundreds of kids who can't imagine life without their products.
[clarification added: My 'significant other' is a teacher, in case anyone was wondering]
My son loves our iPad and there are some interesting educational apps. But check this out, while I have loaded it with fun math games, etc. He just wants to play Sonic Racing and other non-educational apps. This idea that our students will be captivated is a stretch. The author was right, it's a leap of faith. I work at a university in an education department and the iPad frenzy is engulfing us. There has been no critical reflection about how they will be used but instead, administrators act as if they are kids in a candy store. This is a form of addiction. They are turned on by the latest itineration in technology. Like the invention of the PC, then Internet, then podcasts, then smartphones, etc. The iPad is just another examplenof how we will get excited, tune in, andnthen drop it while waiting for the corporations to sell us the next tool. While all these decicesnhave made learning easier for adults (you are engaged in a discussion right now) it is not translating into the classrooms. Or worse, the best technology has to be offered is being used as test prep and learning the alphabet. Imagine, this incredible tool, the iPad, and we use it to teach kindergartners basic literacy. What anjoke.
Note, I am writing this on an iPad and making many errors because of their onscreen keyboard and it's limitations. But for another $80 I can get an extnal keyboard. That' why iPads are in school. So they will have to buynall thebaddnons Apple does not include in the base price. But if it helps them learn how to read...
Before we flood pre-school & kindergarten classrooms w computers [which sounds good in theory & looks good on paper] we should consider this fact- Most children will not have mastered their ABC & 123s till about 3rd grade. Yet the standard computer key-board assumes mastery of that basic skill! Furthermore schools kids learn their ABCs in ABC - XYZ order BUT- the standard computer key-board is arranged in the QWERTY layout- NOT an ABC- XYZ arrangement! And prior to the 3rd or 4th grade, the average school kid's hands are too small to properly type on the standard computer key-board using the home key method. Thus does it really even make practical sense to have regular standard computer classes for school kids prior to the 3rd or 4th grade???
oh no, the kids are bored again. Better buy them something, that'll fix it. Another grade full of kids going through school not learning a foreign language at the optimal ages they should be learning another language. But when you're the greatest country in the world your own language is the only one necessary. Foreigners are scary anyway.