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[ Schools ] President Clinton believes we must connect all of our citizens to the Internet, but he may be skipping the fundamental problems in our schools. The boon that technology has been for business was initially thought to be great for schools. Net Day appeared in cities across the nation, where professionals and companies donate time and equipment to get our schools wired. Unfortunately, all too often these schools were left without adequate personnel to support the network, nor even a need to have a network in the first place. Is the Internet a universal solution to all of our education problems? Scenario: Your children are at school, and using their access to the Internet, they have inadvertently accessed a page with pornography. A few other students see this before a teacher or librarian has a chance to pull the plug on this accident. What was seemingly a mistake now turns into a full-blown issue for the school, with already Internet-phobic parents calling for the elimination of Internet access to the students in the school. It is not unrealistic to think that the average parent today is less knowledgeable about the Internet than his or her child. This can only make a bad situation worse, where parents fear their children will see smut at every turn and a child-pornographer or rapist in every chat room. Solutions that can allay parents' fears are not great in themselves, but we are heading in the right direction. One teacher I discussed this with felt that both a filter program that filters both known pornography sites and flesh-tone graphics, and a tracking program to summarize the sites visited that day, would be enough to reduce or remove his fear of his students accessing inappropriate sites. Even if his students could not see photos often contained in National Geographic, the risks of not having such a system in place are just too great for an entire school. Even more fundamental than access is the question of whether or not computers belong in the classroom at all. Both teachers I interviewed said yes, and in several contexts in which I asked a similar question. First and foremost, computers are a necessary tool for everybody to learn. Even something as simple as browsing a library card catalog must be done on a computer in most urban and suburban regions. School papers almost always need to be typed today from middle-school on, and adults today are also finding that everything they produce must be typed. However, neither teacher would go as far to say that students need to learn programming or special Internet skills, as some have argued in the articles I have read. Instead, they thought that if they could understand what the basics were that their elementary school children needed to learn in order to be successful with programming or advanced technologies, that would be best (e.g. logical thinking is fundamental to programming). Finally, is the disparity between different schools,
also included in the debate of the Digital Divide, really a problem? One student
may have access to the latest material using the Internet, and another may have
only the library's books to use, but if they both produce a high quality report
or project using the resources at hand, the same lessons have been taught to
both students. Even so, we must not forgot the fact that a lack of funding may
prevent current textbooks from being purchased. Should computer in the classroom
and Internet access augment this problem? A good question to ask your local
elementary school would be, "Do your history books or maps of the world
reflect changes in the former Soviet Union, or former Czechoslovakia?" The
answer in many cases is undoubtedly a "No."
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