United States & India Want Computers in Schools
On December 08, 2008 President elect Barack Obama said in a radio address that the economic recovery plan will include repairing aging school buildings, make them energy efficient and install new computers in classrooms. He said “To help our children compete in a 21st century economy; we need to send them to 21st century schools”. A politician calling for introducing computers and broadband connection to schools is nothing new in America.
The President continued by saying “Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m president — because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world”. First of all did America invent the internet? I do not think so. Anyway does introducing high speed internet into classrooms and school in anyway increase a nation’s competitiveness?
In a similar plea the senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Rajya Sabha member M Venkaiah Naidu said that the central and state governments in India should distribute computers to the government schools within five years. He said “there is no dearth of talent in the country but they are not getting enough encouragement. We have failed to recognize talents in the State. The country could progress only by the optimal usage of technology, so the governments should provide computers to all the schools”. So the logic here is providing computers will provide encouragement and recognize the talent in the state?
I am of the opinion that introducing high speed internet and computers to classrooms will do nothing to improve competitiveness as President Obama thinks or provide any encouragement to the students as the Rajya Sabha member believes. Many politicians all over the word, teachers and members of the education profession think that introducing computers into classrooms will somehow transform the education of the students involved. This is due to the fact that many of these individuals themselves do not understand technology.
We as a society have to focus on things that will improve the quality of education and separate these issues from those that are nice to have but are not necessarily needed to provide a good education. Many of our parents or grandparents had to walk miles to go to school (which in most cases was a small park with a lot of trees). Now we have schools with walls and electricity, school buses, and even computers in schools. But has the quality of education improved?
The unfortunate answer is no. In most cases our teachers are students themselves since most of them become teachers the moment they themselves graduate from schools or universities. Increasingly (particularly in the West) those who join the teaching profession themselves are some of the weaker students. The job is not challenging and the better students move on to other professions.
Bringing computers into classes is similar to bringing a television set or a radio into the classroom. Instead of investing in computers the government should hire teachers who are capable of teaching basic software programming, networking concepts, client server, embedded and wireless technology and so on.
Teaching kids how to use the internet and browsing the web is easy (you do not need teachers or schools to do this). In this particular case the role of the school system should be to teach the kids the basics of engineering, software, hardware and networking.
You can do this by using a blackboard that is mounted on a tree trunk.
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Category: News & Government