Technology Has Destroyed Our Public Education

The overwhelming obsession of the nation’s public school administrations with expensive computer technology in the classrooms has had a surprisingly devastating effect, both on their ability to fulfill the educational requirements of the students in their charge, AND to fulfill the contractual financial obligations toward the teachers within their districts.

Coast to coast, public school systems in general and the high school districts in particular have misspent hundreds of millions of tax dollars on classroom computer technology. Originally implemented with the best of intentions to improve and augment the coursework of many subjects, the technology implementation policies which have been responsible for the proliferation of desktop and laptop computers have had quite the opposite results. The computers have become superfluous and high school students are performing worse. The technology actually appears to have contributed little to nothing toward improving the essential reading, writing and mathematical education of the youths.

A strong case can be made that the overwhelming addiction to classroom computer technology has actually impaired the goal of assuring that all students learn at least enough to honestly earn their high school diplomas.

Students no longer learn and use the research and writing skills which were routinely taught and practiced in our parents generation: basic library research and note-taking; interlibrary borrowing of books when local public libraries are insufficient; the art of the rough drafts, first drafts, revised drafts with spelling and grammar corrections, and then final drafts of papers which, when turned in to the instructor, are the students’ BEST work; and, finally, the proper acknowledgment of the sources used in the research – bibliographies, sources cited, footnotes and references.

One of the first things that high school freshman students learn to master once a paper or essay is assigned is to perform a repeated series of electronic plagiarisms known as copying and pasting. This involves digitally highlighting entire paragraphs and chunks of text from such websites as Wikipedia and transferring them en masse to their onscreen report.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute and edit with no peer review of factual information. As such, sites like Wikipedia are not considered by the academic community to be a reliable source of information. In order to test this, I, the author of this article, have entered blatantly false information into a Wikipedia entry and it has never been disputed or edited from the online, public entry these past twelve months.