A laptop in every knapsack

Computers can spark a learning revolution, says the author of a new study of technology and education. But how will we pay for it?

By Andrew Leonard

Oct 1, 2003 | I'm on the board of the PTA at my children's public school, Malcolm X Elementary in Berkeley, Calif. At our last general meeting, while making a pitch for new members, our president discussed the various ways that PTA-generated funding helps the school. We help pay for programs -- sports, drama, music -- that are threatened by state budget cuts. We offer after-school classes. We give money directly to teachers for supplies.

No one at the meeting talked about the possibility of getting a laptop computer for every fourth or fifth grader in the school -- a goal that Bob Johnstone says, in his entertaining and informative "Never Mind the Laptops: Kids, Computers, and the Transformation of Learning," should be realized in every school district, for every child. The school barely avoided laying off 11 teachers last year, and class size in the fourth and fifth grades shot up to as many as 32 kids per class. The idea of laptops for students at Malcolm X strikes me as entirely outlandish. I don't live on that planet.

Which makes me all the more wistful as I consider the photograph on the cover of "Never Mind the Laptops" -- a grinning principal walking in front of a phalanx of Australian middle-school girls, each of whom is carrying a Toshiba laptop and is dressed immaculately in the school uniform (black shoes, white socks, checkered dress). It is jarring -- the photograph seems like it must be science fiction, and yet it was taken more than a decade ago.

That children should have access to computers goes without saying. There's no turning back from the computerized future. And, if one of Johnstone's key theses is correct -- that enough computers, used correctly, encourage precisely the kinds of innovative, risk-taking, cooperative learning that our children will need most to flourish in a globalized information economy -- we shouldn't be afraid of a future where students are always logged on. We should be striving to make it so.

The obstacles to achieving Johnstone's vision -- funding, maintenance, training -- are huge, but there are outstanding pioneers to watch. There is the experience of the Melbourne school that Johnstone details, the pathbreaking Methodist Ladies College. Closer to home, last August, Maine provided laptops for every seventh grader in the entire state. Private schools all over the world are requiring or requesting that parents buy laptops for their children to use at school and at home. Educational software is improving, the price of hardware steadily drops, and a generation of teachers who have grown up with computers is moving into schools.

And yet, from where I sit, in California, Maine's example doesn't seem very applicable, nor does a semi-elite private girl's school Down Under. I can't imagine parents at Malcolm X, who are struggling desperately just to afford an after-school program to baby-sit their kids while they work full-time, ponying up for laptops -- no matter how attractive the leasing arrangements or airtight the insurance and warranties.

More provocatively, there seems to be a real question to me whether politicians and parents in the United States even want the kind of education for their kids that computers, if we are to believe Johnstone, will provide. For Johnstone, a laptop for every student will usher in a new era of progressive education: Children will be encouraged to break out of their shells, to explore what interests them, to gain confidence in their creative potentials. But in California, the pressure from on high is to warp teaching toward ensuring that students do well on standardized tests. That's anything but progressive, especially when one is dealing with elementary schoolchildren.

I bring up my worries not to criticize Johnstone, but to provide some context. Johnstone is a booster, albeit a smart and sincere one. "Never Mind the Laptops" is historically deep, thoroughly reported, and unafraid of exploring the subtleties of its subject. It's not just a paean to technological progress, but also an examination of how kids learn and how they should learn. It is, without a doubt, indispensable to anyone interested in the topic of computers and education. But in its fundamental optimism that the obstacles will be overcome, it may be a little awry. Far more likely, it seems to me, than a future in which every student has a laptop, is a future where those who can afford to have their kids in private schools will reap the huge benefits that a broadband, wired and wireless future has to offer, while those who can't afford it will slip further and further behind.

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