Laptops for a Digital Revolution?

Thirty minutes west of Boston, the Natick school district system has announced a $2.27 million plan to equip all of its students from eighth-grade and up with laptops—every single one of them a Mac. The district’s administration clearly believes that equipping every teenager with a new laptop in class is the best way to prepare them for the challenges of the digital age. Superintendent Peter Sanchioni, one of the backers of the project, told Natick’s School Committee, in a statement printed in the Boston Globe, that “we need to change our view of the mind from classic education.” Others agreed, including the chairman of the School Committee, David Margil, who expected the hardware handout to produce “measurable improvements in student performance” and give Natick’s young people a leg up in the “workforce after they graduate.”

Natick’s decision is by no means an isolated one in America, as more and more people realize that technology must be embraced head-on and early-on to meet the realities of the twenty-first century and keep education competitive. Its approach, of handing every student a laptop as though it were a textbook, to be used in class and handed back eventually, is an extension of other proposals. Natick plans not just to make students technology-literate, but as Sanchioni, indicated, to revolutionize and transform the classroom experience.

The internet is noticeably changing how we gather and learn information, and high school students should be encouraged not to see digital technology as relegated to the spheres of social networking and entertainment. The ability to comb through useless and distracting information on the internet in order to find something worthwhile requires a different training that has largely been left to individuals in our generation of college students. By bringing technology intensively into the classroom, teachers and officials can help students learn better and faster from the web. Yet the scale of Natick’s move—not to mention the expense—begs the question of whether or not middle-aged (or older) local planners have responded with characteristic excess to the digital age. Although the internet has changed a lot about how we live, a move to spend millions of dollars in one small school system to launch a laptop invasion exhibits precisely the dangers in falsely assuming that digitization has radically changed the world, even down to how we think.

The debate over how educators should respond to the continuously evolving ways in which information and material is accessible is both complicated and heavily-examined. It is widely recognized that research skills must be adapted and fine-tuned to the specific challenges of finding information for an academic paper that would, only a decade go, have been done completely within the physical confines of a library. The distractions of the internet’s limitless trove of websites present exactly the limits to doing meaningful, concentrated work centered around a Google search. Students should be taught early on to navigate around the roadblocks of the internet, but having a laptop open in every high-school course may overshoot this goal, harming the immediacy of the class experience. If we accept that the internet has changed not so much how we think or fundamentally process data, but rather demands a new set of skills, then it would seem apparent that a good education must consist of a more balanced focus on technology.

Secondary education stands a better chance of leaving teenagers well educated if laptops are combined with books and physical writing. Schools can perhaps make a more meaningful difference to Information Technology skills by devoting more attention to the separate classes that already exist for this discipline, while keeping some classes laptops free. By balancing the old and new methods of teaching and learning information, students can be made both more computer literate and left free of distraction and the manufactured imposition of the internet at every stage of a high-school career.

There is of course another side to this story revealed by this laptop initiative. By choosing to spend such a large sum on one laptop for every student, Natick says a lot about the vast inequities in our school system. Thirty minutes away, in Dorchester and other low-income areas of Boston, many schools struggle to purchase up-to date textbooks. Distributing personal laptops so that every student can emerge suitably competitive for the professional world would not be not merely out of the question, but more likely a risible proposal. This kind of reality shows, to some extent, that our own debate on technology diverges from the one that affects many, less wealthy school systems. Since the Massachusetts state government is not involved in local politics and decisions on property-tax expenditure, it is always the case that some districts will provide their public schools with significantly more resources than others. Even so, it is worth considering at a purely conceptual level how much better spend this $2.27 million might have on introducing broad technology and IT training across a wide cross-section of public schools.

The challenges of the internet mean students must be introduced early on to methods of doing serious academic and professional work in this format. In an effort to meet the demands of a digital age whose revolutionary effect has been frequently exaggerated, one district has chosen mistakenly to spend money that could have been better spent elsewhere.