IIntroduction

I would like to start this presentation with a short story. The scene is the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., September 2001. I had just given a short statement in support of a press release issued by the Alliance For Childhood calling for a moratorium on computer purchases by elementary schools in the U.S. My comments had followed statements by physicians, researchers and other child health specialists, all expressing concern over various evidence that the use of computers might be a factor in the growing number of mental and physical health problems of children in the U.S. There had been many questions asked by journalists during this press conference, most of which had been surprisingly nonconfrontational. But now a woman stood up and, shedding her professional role and demeanor, presented me with a personal observation and question that quieted the entire room.

She told me of her efforts to begin teaching her four-year-old daughter to read and the tremendous frustration she experienced getting her to learn the alphabet. Then one day she took her daughter to the public library, where she sat down at a computer and played a letter recognition game on the computer. The results amazed this journalist-mother. Her daughter began learning the alphabet quickly, and was now beginning to read words using the same program. Having finished her story, the lady paused, looked at me with a mixture of confusion and anger, and asked, "Why do you want to take that away from my child?"

That's a legitimate and important question, one I hope I can answer here better than I did at the press conference. I will proceed slowly, with some twists and turns because this is a complex issue, and requires a much deeper and more comprehensive examination than educators have been giving it. So please bear with me, as I try to explain why, despite all my years teaching young people with and about computers, I have concluded that introducing computers into the education of small children is likely to do more harm than good.

The recognition that a technology might change things for the worse rather than the better is becoming more prevalent these days. It wasn't that long ago that the conventional wisdom was that technological change automatically assured human progress; that it was how you use a tool that matters, and it's just a matter of time and research to discover the best way. But as we look back on the environmental devastation of the 20th century, as we witness the international turmoil over genetically modified crops and as we worry over the loss of effectiveness of antibiotics, that faith seems hopelessly naive. And with the nightmarish vision of airliners being turned into guided missiles burned into our global psyche and once futuristic human clones suddenly appearing in the present (perhaps), it is becoming clear even to the technology worshipping citizens of the U.S. that our relationship with technology is not so unproblematic as we once thought it was.

Technology is a Faustian Bargain

There is, in fact, a growing awareness that our relationship with our tools is much more complex and difficult than the 19th century optimists believed. Every new technology is a double edged sword, bringing both positive and negative effects to a society. But those effects are not experienced in the same ways. Jacques Ellul (1990), one of the seminal thinkers on technology, summed it up this way: "The positive results of a technical enterprise are immediate. They are felt at once, as in the case of electricity or television. The negative effects, however, are long-term and are felt only with experience" (pg 73). In other words, technology always presents us with a Faustian bargain: power and benefits now, for which we pay later.

I suspect that is not a startling revelation for many of you here at this conference. Latin America has a long history of suffering the jarring social effects that have accompanied new technologies exported by the U.S. and Europe. Some of Ivan Illich's most profound insights grew out of his descriptions of the culturally destructive effects of technologies imported into Mexico from the North (1973). Recognition of this danger has only recently begun to be expressed, and with some alarm, by some interesting parties there. Just last year the U.S. National Academy of Engineering issued a report begins this way:

At the heart of our modern technological society lies an unacknowledged paradox. Although the United States is increasingly defined by and dependent on technology and is adopting new technologies at a breathtaking pace, its citizens are not equipped to make well-considered decisions or to think critically about technology. (2002, pg 1)

What this organization and other observers are finally beginning to recognize is that the world's leaders in technological know-how are remarkably ignorant when it comes to know-why.

Sadly, recognition of this problem has barely touched the world of education. To be sure, the ed tech experts have finally stopped barraging us with variations on Thomas Edison's claim, made in 1922, that "I believe the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks" (quoted in Cuban, 1986, pg 9). The hundred year tradition (it actually goes back much further than that) of trusting new technologies to completely overhaul education seems to finally be waning.

Why this perception of educational techno-utopia persisted in the U.S. with such a long and unrelenting history of failure and resultant massive waste of educational funds is an important question that we will come back to later. What I want to stress here is that there is an astonishing, and frankly, shameful lack of knowledge by educational technologists in the U.S about the historical, philosophical and social relationship between humans and machines. To prepare teachers to use computers in schools without being aware of the arguments of seminal thinkers such as Ellul, Illich or Lewis Mumford is like lecturing teachers on economics without being aware of the arguments of Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Those arguments, along with the more recent critiques emerging from the environmental and anti-globalization movements, are essential in helping educators develop strategies that match what is known about child development with appropriate uses of technologies for learning.

The Messages Sent by Computers

Making that match is far more important than developing computer skills, or even using the computer to learn content material. But we will never succeed in that task, probably will never even get to it, if we persist in starting our conversations with the question, "How do we use computers to help children learn?" We need to take Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism, "The Medium is the Message", seriously and stop paying attention exclusively to what our children can do with a computer and much more attention to what it does to them. That is what I want to do here: Look at the message, or messages, that this medium, the computer itself, sends to our youngest children. I want to discuss with you not how we can put the computer to work for our children, but how it works on our children whenever and however they use it; and how it works on us as well. As Neil Postman, has observed, "What we need to consider about computers has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning" (1993, pg 19).

To get at that we need to spend a little time clarifying some misconceptions about the fundamental character of technology before we can speak directly to its role in young children's lives. The first issue we have to confront is the notion that tools are neutral. The common response, "It's only a tool. It's how you use it that counts" is wholly insufficient to describe our relationship with technology. To make that claim assumes that technologies have no influence on our behavior. That is simply untrue, for many reasons.

Here I want to focus on just one of those reasons that has particular significance for young children. It has come to be called the principle of amplification and reduction. The microphone offers almost a literal example of this principle. Once I turn on the power it amplifies my ability to reach a large audience, but it also reduces my ability to have an intimate, private conversation with a small number of people. I'll give you an example using the computer of how this amplification and reduction process plays out in schools. This particular example involves older students, but the point it makes is relevant to all ages.

For nearly a decade, while still teaching high school, I helped design and coordinate global telecommunication. Usually, one of my school's Language Arts or Social Studies classes participated in the project I was facilitating. One year I took on a group of volunteers myself, all of whom happened to be students in a Language Arts class that met just down the hall from me. Right next to that classroom was an English as a Second Language. In fact, the doors to the two rooms, which were set back from the hallway about 20 feet, were right next to each other. One day during the project, I happened to be standing outside my room when the bell rang to end classes. I noticed my volunteers walk to their lockers. What caught my attention was that right next to them were walking, just as they had all year, the ESL students from next door. Not one student from the telecommunication project - no one from the Language Arts class at all - even looked at the ESL students, much less talked to them. Here we had been exchanging ideas about cultures with students on the other side of the planet for months and it had never dawned on these students (or their teachers) to merely turn their heads 90 degrees and talk to students from Bosnia, Somalia, the Sudan, Russia, Mexico, the Czech Republic, and half a dozen other nations.

I don't blame the students for this. It's not easy making overtures to ESL students. But, of course, the ease the Internet offers of working around this difficulty is just the point. If what young people needed to learn was easy we wouldn't need teachers, or schools - the 'Net, with its endless flow of information, would probably be enough. If computers bring any revolution to education it should grow out of the realization that the teacher's responsibility now begins where the ease ends. And in terms of multicultural education the ease ends where the flesh-and-blood begins. Learning about cultures is just a matter of gathering information - it's easy and relatively painless. Coming to terms with other cultures is not. It only happens when customs, manners and beliefs collide in the flesh and force us to dig inside ourselves and wrestle with our own innermost beliefs. It is just this most crucial, often painful part of learning that leads to real tolerance and understanding - in other words, a transformation of the human soul. It is just this that the Internet tends to shield us from. And the world is in great peril today, in part, because, even as communication technology amplifies our knowledge about other cultures, it reduces the necessity of developing the compassion, tolerance and humaneness that comes from direct and sustained encounters with those cultures. This is a lesson all teachers need to learn in the age of the computer: that these powerful technologies expand our students' power to gain information about the external world, but in doing so tend to draw them - and us - away from activities that challenge and nurture the inner capacities needed to learn from the world.

What is Missing from Those Messages

Let me return to the microphone example to push this point in the direction of young children. I suspect we all have enjoyed a singing performance of a young child whose small voice reached us with the aid of a microphone. That tool amplifies the power of the child's not yet fully developed lungs. Perhaps some of you have, like me, also sat through high school performances where singers still mumble into the microphone, barely opening their mouths and hardly expanding their chests, because in relying on that tool over the years they have never had to develop their own lung power. In working with children, who are in the process of developing all kinds of inner capacities, it is essential to remember that by amplifying and giving external aid to those capacities, tools, including mental tools, can also eliminate the need and opportunities to develop those capacities fully within the child. This is why Marshall McLuhan chose to use stronger language in referring to this characteristic: He called it amplification and amputation.

How does this get played out educationally? We are all aware of superficial, though important, examples like using a spell checker rather than learning to spell, or using a calculator instead of learning to add. But if we're really going to rethink our relationship with technology, we need to get more sophisticated than that. And I think we can move in that direction by looking at something actually quite simple, like a young child getting to know the qualities of a tree. Powerful tools like the computer or books can tell a four-year-old a lot about trees. But that's very different than learning from trees. A four-year-old learns from a tree by being in its presence: peeling its bark, climbing among its branches, crumbling its leaves, sitting under its shade, recognizing its strength by running into it. Just as importantly, these first-hand experiences are enveloped by feelings and associations - muscles being used, sun warming the skin, blossoms scenting the air - none of which can be even approximated by a computer or a book. The process of learning from a tree involves a creative act that engages all of the senses: imaginatively connecting the tree with the feelings and responses that one generates in encountering it.

Ask U.S. ecologists why most children's environmental programs are now focused on local activities rather than saving the rain forest, and they will likely tell you what they have learned from hard experience: that unless she learns to love a particular tree as a child, she won't love the rainforest enough as an adult to help protect it, no matter how much alarming information you give her (Talbott, 1995). It is almost impossible to care deeply for something you know only in the abstract.

Of course, none of this is new insight. Rousseau knew almost 300 years ago that information about the world has to grow from roots of deep experiences with the world in order to be meaningful. This is equally true of children learning how to relate to people. Today teachers everywhere in the U.S. are using the communication and language instruction capabilities of the computer to improve (or amplify) the writing and reading skills in their students, from pre-school on up. At the same time, it is estimated that this generation of children will experience1/3 fewer face-to-face conversations during their school years than the generation raised 30 years ago (Hammel, 1999). These two observations are closely related, because research shows that it is face-to-face interaction with caring older people that is one of the most crucial elements in the development of both oral and written communication skills. And it is not how much instruction the child gets in reading that best predicts whether a child will become an avid reader, but how often they are read to by caring adults, another face-to-face activity. No amount of entertaining instruction from a machine can compensate for the loss of the deep, intuitive understanding and appreciation for language that comes from direct communication with caring human beings. What we see happening in the U.S. is well intentioned parents and early childhood educators actually deepening problems in literacy by using the computer to try to overcome them.

The Problem Behind the Computer

I hope that I have at least convinced you that the computer is more problematic than all those folks trying to sell you their software want you to believe. Still, I don't believe the source of those problems resides in the computer itself. To get at the source, we have to look past the computer, or through it, to examine what it is that draws us to it, that makes it so attractive educationally that we rarely stop to even ask it if poses any problems for our children.

To get at that source I want to start by investigating an activity chosen several years ago by Iowa Public Television as a model of excellence in computer assisted learning. A video of the activity was shown on a program called Teach to Tech for which I was invited to participate as a commentator.

The video shows a 4th grade class using computers to produce electronic "hyper"-book reports on a story that teaches some important lessons about living and dying, friendship and community. The video showed a number of the students proudly demonstrating their and discussing the important social lessons they learned. The teacher then explains that her students were so enthusiastic about the computer project that they stopped going outside for recess, preferring to stay in their seats working on the project. She notes that they would never do that to write a 15 page book report. At the end, the school superintendent suggests that it is crucial to teach children how to use computers early so that they will emerge from school with the skills they need to be successful in a high tech society. Clearly, the messages conveyed by this video were designed to resonate with the most common concerns of teachers and parents: 1. The computer can motivate students; 2. The computer helps children learn by doing; 3. The computer does not foster anti-social tendencies - in fact, it can be used to learn about community. The teacher's enthusiasm was contagious and my colleagues on the panel were uniformly impressed. Even I could not deny that those ends were accomplished in that class.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of computers that is exhibited in this video is a subtle one: computers give young people extraordinary power to control a particular learning environment. Children, who have so little control over so many things, often times really respond to that gift. It is this sense of power and control that is amplified whenever the computer is used by children. But, as I tried to convince you earlier, no technological gift is really free. There are some costs here, reductions that accompany the amplifications. To get at those reductions, let me ask a series of rhetorical questions:

The first question deals with recess: Why was the teacher so pleased that students stayed in from recess to work on the computer. If we are concerned at all about the socialization of small children, then it has to be because they need those skills to become positive members of a free society. But where is it in a school that children are most free to practice negotiating their own community?

In Stephen Talbott's book, The Future Does Not Compute (1995), he writes,"If I need to find out whether [a child] will become a good world citizen, don't show me a file of her email correspondence. Just let me observe her behavior on the playground for a few minutes" (pg 139). Not just "good world citizen" but good friend, good neighbor, good community member. Like learning from trees by being in their presence, it's only when the structure of the classroom and the authority of the adult is lifted that children can practice the discipline needed to be, not just learn about, a community.

All of this points to a connection between technology and a disturbing phenomenon: The diminution of unstructured play in the U.S. This teacher's comments are not in any way unique. Both IBM and Compaq have run magazine ads in the past five years playing off the theme of children staying in from recess to work on computers At the same time, we have witnessed 40% of the school districts in the U.S. dramatically eliminate recess altogether (Kieff, 2001). All of this in the face of decades of research (and centuries of motherly wisdom) that clearly shows that shewing children outside to play on their own is critical to their physical, cognitive and social health.

Here's another question. The story these children constructed their hyper-book reports about deals with the responsibility that one generation has for the another at each end of the life cycle. So it is fair to ask why, given the centrality of this message in the book, would the teacher choose to have her children spend their time working with machines rather than going to visit elders in the community and spending time with the very young?

And finally we might ask why the teacher only offered as an alternative to the computer project a 15 page book report? More generally, the assumption we need to challenge is that there is only a choice between traditional methods of teaching and the high tech method. As long as 15 page book reports are conceived as the only other options, the computer will certainly look good to elementary teachers. For decades educational technologists have set up the droning "sage on the stage" and the book report as the straw men that computer technology easily knocks down. But in reality, good teachers got off the stage a long time ago, and "being a guide on the side" does not require high technology at all. It is time that instructional technology stop beating on a dead, or at least dying horse, and compare the value of computer technology with that of other innovative learning approaches competing for scarce resources. So far when that has happened, computers have not faired very well. As even the U.S. National Science Board, which for decades promoted the use of computers in schools, finally admitted in a 1998 report,

The fundamental dilemma of computer-based instruction and other IT-based educational technologies is that their cost effectiveness compared to other forms of instruction - for example, smaller class sizes, self-paced learning, peer teaching, small group learning, innovative curricula, and in-class tutors - has never been proven. (Science, Pg 8-19)

I don't want to get deeply into the issue of effectiveness here, because it remains a contentious quagmire that actually diverts us from better understanding the relationship between technology and education. I just wanted to note that one of the ways we need to rethink technology for 21st century schools is to compare it not just to 19th century pedagogy but with other innovative 20th and 21st century ways of learning.

I want to return to the video to pick up one more question: Given how quickly technology changes, why does the superintendent, at the end, claim that it is important for students to learn technical skills in fourth grade that will be obsolete long before they leave school? Does he really believe that if fourth graders in the 1980s learned how to use Apple IIes they were better prepared for the working world or college than others in their age group who weren't so "privileged" and just learned how to use Macs and PCs in highschool in the 90s? This enduring assumption that kids need to be on computers early in school in order to leave school with adequate computer skills is, to put it bluntly, absurd. During the ten years I taught Advanced Computer Technology, the most advanced computer course the Des Moines Public Schools offered, I eventually stopped worrying about whether a student applying for my class had the prerequisite computer application classes, or even any previous computer experience. I could catch them up on any basic computer skills they needed in a short time. What they needed to bring was a creative spirit, curiosity and a first hand knowledge of the world that they could apply their computer skills to. More and more the students I taught in that class, having been raised on TV, video games and computers, did not bring those kinds of experiences and ideas to my classroom, and found little to do with computers except what the computer itself offers. It was recognition of that diminution of their abilities to draw on first hand concrete experiences to inform, inspire and direct their computer work that helped me realize that even in a high tech society - especially in a high tech society - we cannot bypass the long and deep absorption of the early childhood years in direct, physical and social interaction.

The Technological Ideology

So why do we feel so compelled to find ways to get children to use computers when they are very young? It's certainly not the computer skills that are at issue here. And it's not just whether kids learn with computers. It's something else, something much more fundamental, much less conscious that drives superintendents to dedicate scarce funds to buying technology on faith; that connects the widespread abolition of recess in elementary schools with a baffling enthusiasm for watching small children sit immobile before a two dimensional screen; that causes teachers to see computers as the only alternative to traditional methods; that entices futurists to see a technological utopia right around the corner of each new invention.

I believe that something is a technological ideology, a worldview, a way of engaging the world that has gradually grown over the course of the last 400 years to the point where, when it was finally engraved in silicon, it came to dominate not only our actions but our way of thinking. In doing so, it formed a culture into which we now seem determined to initiate our children at as early an age as possible.

This is not original thinking on my part. Postman (1992) has labeled it Technopoly. Theodore Roszak (1969) called it Technocracy. Whatever we call it, it means that the real rethinking that we have to do about technology has less to do with the machines that are out there in the classroom and more to do with the kind of machine-like thinking that goes on in our own, and more and more our students' minds. As philosopher Stephen Talbott puts it, "What I really fear is the hidden and increasingly powerful machine within us, of which the machines we create are but an expression" (1995, pg 36). This is where that deeper problem is located: not in the computer on the desk, but in the increasingly computer-like thinking in our heads. And, therefore, the most important questions that we should be asking about using computers with small children has nothing to do with developing technical skills, or even cognitive skills. They have to do with how the values generated by that thinking affect children's social, cultural, psychological and moral development. Everything I have discussed here, all the examples, all the assumptions I've challenged, have been pointing us in the direction of what this ideology looks like in relation to education.

What I want to do now is explicitly describe what this way of thinking looks like. It's a tricky project. Ideologies tend to sit at the edge of our consciousness - they frame our thinking, rather than lend themselves to it. We have to get outside of that frame to take a look at it. That's what I was trying to do with the alternatives I suggested to the activities in the video. But that still involved the computer. I want to be more general here, so let me begin by telling you of an incident I had while still a high school teacher.

For the last three years that I taught in high school I ate lunch three times a week with a student I'll call David. He was a very bright, if somewhat awkward, young man - at age 13 he had been the best student in a gifted and talented Geometry class I taught - and he and I spent these luncheons discussing a common interest, philosophy. We also talked about personal matters. He revealed to me that he had been diagnosed ADHD at a young age and had been taking Ritalin since 4th grade. One day, only a couple months before he graduated, he rushed into my room and announced to me that that morning he had flushed all of his Ritalin down the toilet. When I asked him why, he gave a remarkable answer. "I realized that every morning I get up and go through this ritual of soul suicide," he said. "I take a pill to fix all of my problems before I ever run into them." He decided he could never work through his problems with family, school and classmates if he couldn't confront them, so he put the pills away. Whether he will succeed remains to be seen - his life since then has certainly not been painless. But he expected that. Whereas those around him have for years defined his problems in physiological, mechanical terms, as if there is something broken inside of him and have sought external means to wall him off from access to that broken piece of himself, he has chosen to redefine those problems as an internal struggle which he hopes to develop the inner strength to wrestle with and overcome.

Though this example centers on one medical technology, what this young man finds himself confronted with is the consequences of embracing technology as an ideology, of engaging the world in a way that puts more and more trust in a mechanical orientation to life. Ritalin is an efficient, physical treatment, that helped all involved function more comfortably by getting the child quickly under control. It made no serious, painful demands on a dysfunctional family, an unresponsive community or school that refused to attend to his precociousness; required no examination of technological effects on surroundings (food additives, pollution, etc.); entailed no long term inner struggle by the child. It yanked the problem out of all community, family or even spiritual context, defined it in its narrowest mechanico-chemical constituance and provided a mechanico-chemical fix.

I should hasten to add that I am not here advocating that we take Ritalin away from all children. I have met with enough parents whose family lives were finally made bearable by this and other psychotropic drugs to shy away from such facile suggestions. Yet there is no longer any doubt that in the U.S. Ritalin has been scandalously over prescribed. What I would like to suggest is that this is not just a matter of poor diagnosis. It is a consequence of relying on a technical orientation, a way of viewing the world that sees children in mechanical terms and children's struggles as simply breakdowns in the machinery, rather than a signal that something is amiss in the social, psychological, even spiritual fabric of the child's life.

In his wonderful book, The Courage To Teach (1998), Parker Palmer uses language remarkably similar to my young friend in generalizing the problem with this worldview.

We are obsessed with manipulating externals because we believe that they will give us some power over reality and win us some freedom from its constraints. Mesmerized by a technology that seems to have done just that, we dismiss the inward world. We turn every question we face into an objective problem to be solved - and we believe that for every objective problem there is some sort of technical fix. That is why we train doctors to repair the body but not to honor the spirit; clergy to be CEOs but not spiritual guides; teachers to master techniques but not to engage their students' souls. (pg 19)

Palmer is calling our attention here to the gradual loss of faith in developing those very internal resources that David refused to trade away. It is through the centuries long shift from a belief in the possibility of a better life through perfecting the person to hope for a better life through perfecting our tools that the technological ideology causes us to lose focus on our children's inner growth.

What we ultimately find in U.S. education is an accelerating drive to provide children with the external means of power needed to exert control over their world, away from what we might call the "soulful" task of developing the inner resources and community support needed to create healthy relationships with the world. Just a quick glance at the language of education today in the U.S. indicates the extent of that movement. Rarely do policy makers speak of truth, wisdom, judgment, character, dignity, virtue or integrity - all inner capacities that once formed the essential ingredients of a good education. This language of the education of the soul has been replaced by language of the machine: standardized tests, progress reports, measurements, external assessment, accountability, GPAs, SATs, ACTs and a host of other technical terms designed to cast education as a product governed by efficiency rather than act of growth governed by the necessities of human development. Everywhere in the U.S. the focus is on outcomes rather than insights, with consequences that would generate outrage if educators were truly determined, as Palmer says, to "engage their students' souls." Just one example: Today nearly all states give high stakes proficiency exams to children as young as age nine. The stress caused by these exams is so severe that in California they have added to the test manuals for fourth graders instructions on what the teacher should do if an overwrought student throws up on the test. And yet this past winter Congress passed a law requiring proficiency testing in the federally funded Head Start preschools.

The Lack of Balance in Children's Lives

What we are confronting here, of course, is an issue of balance. But as should be clear by now, it is not just a matter of balancing computer time with other activities in schools and preschools. What we have to recognize is the total imbalance of children's lives both inside and outside of school due to the dominance of the technological ideology - the fact that nearly everything a child does today is mediated by machines and machine thinking. McLuhan, writing in 1964, anticipated the growing imbalance of children's lives and suggested that "education will become recognized as civil defense against media fallout" (1964, pg. 267).

Obviously, that did not happen. Today in the U.S. children are being raised on a steady diet of virtual trips down the Amazon, virtual climbs to the summit of Mt. Everest, and virtual trips into orbit? These are now common fare and schools are clamoring to participate. These activities, which start with flashy computer games in preschool, represent one technological high after another for students. But the thrills that draw the students into these adventures are vicarious thrills, disconnected from their own experience. How can those adventures connect to the soul of a child who doesn't even go outside for recess. The student doesn't soar into orbit, doesn't reach the North Pole, doesn't climb Everest. She doesn't even climb to the top of the jungle gym. Faced with an inability to connect her students' lives in any meaningful way with the symbolic representations on the screen, the teacher finds that she must constantly ratchet up the excitement level of each new "interactive" activity, until learning becomes indistinguishable from entertainment.

Last year research published in Scientific American (Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002), verified a long held suspicion of many parents and teachers: That TV, and most likely, all other video screen activities, possess all of the same clinically identifiable characteristics required to classify them as addictive substances. This astoundingly under publicized finding is not surprising to anyone who has tried to have children use computers in a balanced way. I know from my own experience that pulling students back down to the earth of their immediate surroundings after telecommunications projects inevitably resulted in feelings of boredom and disinterest - and a desire to get back on-line. It was so pronounced that I labeled students who most displayed it BEJ: Big Event Junkies. These are the kids for whom classes have to be conducted with all the multimedia sensationalism of the nightly news just to keep them engaged. Don't be surprised if some day BEJ (or a more scientific label) is added to LD, BD, ADD and ADHD as a psychological malady in children. But, like my friend David, these kids' problems are really projections of a deeper social dysfunction. At the core of that dysfunction is educators and parents who, in searching for the key to motivation, have been led to believe that excitement is an adequate substitute for meaning. They mistake stimulating the adrenal gland for nurturing the soul.

Actually, none of this is new insight. Computing pioneer Joseph Wiezenbaum (1976) warned nearly thirty years ago that the computer "enslaves the mind that has no other metaphors and few other resources to call on" (pg 277). In an adult world saturated with computer technology, those other metaphors and resources have to be developed early in life. If our children are to establish a connection with the soil and the wind, the flesh and the blood, it is more crucial than ever that while they are young they get to hit the balls, roll the dough, lie in the grass, get in arguments, talk with interested and interesting people face-to-face. And they need as many of these experiences as we can give them. Yet, instead of helping us find more ways for our children to act in the world, technology advocates are encouraging us to buy our children yet another electronic box with which to look out at it, to substitute information for direct experience.

Weizenbaum also pointed out that technical thinking provides no moral or ethical direction at all. Therefore, as the machines that we put in our childrens' hands become more and more powerful, it is crucial that we increase our efforts to help them recognize the immense responsibility they have to use them for the good of humanity. This insight took on profound meaning for me, when I realized while teaching my Advanced Computer Technology classes that these student had more power to do more harm to more people than any teens have ever had in history, and all at a safe distance. And it often seemed that those students with the most computer experience and skill had the most trouble thinking of projects that met my stringent ethical standards. When, out of utter frustration, I once agree to let some of these students try to break through the school's network security, the response was, "Hey, cool!" and off they went, until I hauled them back and reasserted my authority. Which is the point I am trying to make: once the external controls were lifted, there were no internal controls in many of these 17-18 year-olds to take over.

Where will the control come from when we release entire generations of these youngsters into society? Unless we are willing to drop all pretence of protecting and enlarging individual freedom in the world, we must help our young people (and perhaps I should add, some of our older leaders) develop the considerable moral and ethical strength needed to resist abusing the enormous power these machines give them. Those qualities take a great deal of time and effort to develop in a child, but they ought to be as much a prerequisite to using powerful computer tools as learning how to type. Trying to teach a student to harness and use appropriately the power of computer technology without those moral and ethical traits is like trying to grow a tree without roots.

It is those roots, those inner resources of our children, that connect them to a community and generate a strong sense of moral and ethical responsibility, which, in turn, can discipline the power computers put at their service. But rather than nurture those roots so they find their place in community, we hand our smallest children machines that turn their energies toward asserting power and control over their surroundings. And then we wonder why, when in the U.S. our high tech suburban teens find themselves confused, angry, depressed or overwhelmed they don't reach out to the community for help, or dig deep within themselves to find the internal strength to persevere, but rather they reach for the most powerful (and often deadly) tool they can find to solve their problems. If there is anything I want convey to you here today it is that our attempts in the U.S. to use powerful machines to making learning easy and painless and accelerated has come at the cost of developing our children's inner strength and deep connectedness to community, and the entire world, but especially our children, are paying an extraordinarily high price for it.

So what do we do?

Rethinking Our Relationship with Technology

I am a bit embarrassed to confess that having gone to great lengths to describe the problem, I am reluctant to suggest any solutions. I will, indeed, offer a few modest suggestions. But I am reluctant to do this, in part, because of the nature of the problem itself, which is bound up in culture. It seems to me that anyone coming from the U.S., a thoroughly technologized culture, which despite its enormous wealth and capacity to raise physically healthy children has become an extremely unhealthy place for young people, should be circumspect about offering advice, other than cautionary advice, to educators from other cultures about the use of educational technology. My own experience living and teaching in Ecuador suggests to me that Latin American cultures share certain deeply human characteristics that offer some protection against the destructive aspects of the technological ideology that the computer subtly but insistently promotes. Perhaps those values and traditions will help you make wiser decisions than we have. But great and conscious effort should be made to preserve those cultural traditions, for technology is, as Postman (1995) reminds us, a jealous god.

In any event, I am not going to suggest that you simply lock the schoolhouse doors to computers. That would be neither realistic nor wise. I would not have spent so much of my career teaching high school students how to use computers if I had thought they were inherently evil. But the U.S. practice of throwing computers indiscriminately at every level of education and then trying to find something to do with them should not be repeated around the world. What we belatedly need, and what I hope is of value to you as well, is systematic, conscious programs that put the computer in its proper place in relation to child development and at the same time provide a sort of inoculation against the ill-effects that accompany its benefits. For the past three years I have been working with the Alliance for Childhood to develop a set of developmental assumptions and technology guidelines to help educators establish those kinds of programs. The assumptions are founded on a belief that for young children, the decision to use of any technology should be governed by its ability to support and deepen what we consider to be the healthy essentials of childhood. These healthy essentials include:

1. Close, loving relationships with responsible adults.
2. Outdoor activity, nature exploration, gardening, and other direct encounters with nature.
3. Time for active, creative play, as part of the core curriculum for young children.
4. Music, drama, puppetry, dance, painting, and the other arts, offered both as separate classes and as a kind of yeast to bring the full range of other academic subjects to life.
5. Hands-on lessons, handcrafts, and other physically engaging activities, which literally embody the most effective first lessons for young children in the sciences, mathematics, and technology.
6. Rich language experiences, including conversation, poetry, singing, storytelling, and books read aloud with beloved adults. (Fool's Gold, 2000, pg 47)

It might seem that there is no place given in these activities at all for the use of technology. That is true only if the concept of technology is radically narrowed to electronic high technology. A broader and more complete conceptualization of technology, one that encompasses all tool use, reveals that, indeed, there is a strong relationship exhibited here between childhood development and the tools children employ in healthy activities. Gardening, puppetry, painting, music, handcrafts, and reading all rely on skillful use of tools. "Hands-on" lessons directly implicate the importance of a variety of tool uses by children. Unfortunately, current technology literacy programs tend to equate technology with electronic digital technology and, thus, fail to promote the important benefits that come from using such low tech tools as hammers, sticks, string, shovels, ribbons, crayons, etc. A new technology literacy that operates out of a deep concern for the emerging character of children's needs, recognizes the full range of technical activities available and necessary for healthy growth. Indeed, it understands that a high tech society requires a high touch childhood.

The second project, the establishing of principles of technology awareness, is in the final stage of revision, but because it is intended to be not a rigid set of standards, but rather flexible suggestions, I feel comfortable sharing a draft of it with you here. My hope is that you will take these principles and adapt them to your own local contexts, adhering only to the life-promoting philosophy from which they were developed.

Twelve Principles for Developing Technology Awareness

1. Slow Down: Developing the Emotional, Social, and Intellectual Maturity to Operate Powerful Technologies Takes Much Time, Mentoring, and Developmentally Appropriate Care at Home and School.
2. Relate to the Real World First.
3. Recognize Life, in All Its Diversity, Unpredictability, and Impermanence, as Sacred - Including Death. Refuse to Treat Living Things as Machines.
4. Treat Tools and Technologies with Respect and Mindfulness.
5. Resist the Illusion of Technological Destiny: The Design and Use of Technologies Stem from Human Choices, Involving Profound Questions of Ethics.
6. Everyone Deserves a Voice in Technology Choices - Especially Those Who Most Directly Bear the Consequences.
7. It's Only a Choice If You Are Free to Set Limits - Or Even Say No.
8. Solving Our Most Pressing Social and Ecological Problems Depends Far More on Developing Socially Responsible Behavior Than Designing Dazzling New Technologies.
9. Honor the Precautionary Principle: First, Do No Harm.
10. High School is the Time to Focus on High-Tech Skills.
11. To Teach Technological Awareness, Be Technologically Aware.

These principles are, to be sure, terse. The full text of the accompanying guidelines contains thirty pages of elaboration and examples of how these principles can be operationalized in schools, homes and communities. What I just want to emphasize here is that all of these principles share one fundamental feature: They situate technology and technology decisions within human activities rather than the other way around. They do not start by asking how we can prepare youth for a predetermined technological future or what children can do with computers, but rather when and how we can make technology serve our human purposes.

Education's most crucial task is to help our youth develop their best sense of those human purposes. The most dangerous problems facing my society--drugs, violence, racism, poverty, the dissolution of family and community, and, of course, war-cannot be fixed by technology; these are all matters of confusion over human purposes. Preparing our children for good technical jobs will not help my country find the answers to why the freest nation in the world has the highest percentage of citizens behind bars; why the wealthiest nation in history condemns a fifth of its children to poverty; why the most medically advantaged country ever has the most medicated children; why the most technologically advanced society on earth can't protect its citizens from a handful of deeply committed terrorists.

Theodore Roszak, in his book The Cult of Information (1986), writes that "we live in a time when the technology of human communication has advanced at blinding speed; but what people have to say to one another by way of that technology shows no comparable development" (pg 16). Today we have magnificent means for communication in place. In the U.S. even our youngest children are bombarded with more information than they can deal with. In fact, we have reached the point where these powerful tools of learning have begun interfering with more than helping our ability to teach and learn how to say meaningful things to each other. And for things to be meaningful they must touch our souls, not just our minds. Young children are, most emphatically, souls searching for meaning. To set them before soulless machines is to misread what children really need.

When the journalist/mother asked me why I wanted to take her daughter's reading machine away from her, I responded by asking her why she felt so anxious to force her daughter to read at such an early age, when undoubtedly she would pick it up easily a couple years later when that capacity naturally emerged. I suggested to her that it was much more important for her daughter to be read to by her mother, to help her cook and clean, to play amongst the trees, to learn to use the simple tools whose operation she can comprehend, to get to know the world around her rather than abstract, squiggly lines on a computer screen. I told her, rather harshly, I'm afraid, that it wasn't her child who needed to read at age four, but adults who have bought into the notion that we can program children like we program computers, and the faster the better. If I had known the question was coming, perhaps I would have been gentler and said instead that if she was patient and waited for her daughter's natural capacities to unfold, both of them would be spared a great deal of frustration. She would also be more likely to one day be rewarded with a daughter who fully comprehends the wisdom in the deceptively simple Biblical verse: "To everything there is a season." The season for the computer is not the springtime of a child's life.

References

Cordes, C. & Miller, E. (2000). Fool's Gold: A critical look at computers in childhood. Alliance for Childhood.

Cuban, L. (1986). Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920. New York: Teachers College Press.

Ellul, J. (1990). The Technological Bluff. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Hammel, S. (1999). Generation of loners? Living their lives online. U.S. News and World Report, November 29. Pg 79.

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Kubey, R. & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002). Television addiction is no mere metaphor. Scientific American. February, 2002.

Pearson, G. & Young, A. (2002). Technically Speaking: Why All Americans Need to Know More About Technology. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Palmer, P. (1998). The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass.

Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books.

Postman, N. (1995). The End of Education. New York: Knopf.

Roszak, T. (1969). The Making of a Counter Culture. Garden City: Doubleday.

Roszak, T. (1986). The Cult of Information - A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking. Berkley: University of California Press.

Science & Engineering Indicators (1998). U.S. National Science Board.

Talbott, S. (1995). The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machine in Our Midst. Sebastopol: O'Reilly & Assoc.

Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason - From Judgment to Calculation. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.