Why Do You Want to Take the Computer Away from My Child?:

Rethinking the relationship between young children and technology

Discussions about technology and children almost always focus on how computers can be used to improve children’s learning. Little attention has been paid to the ways that computers alter the social, psychological and cultural conditions of learning. And almost no attention has been paid to the influence of these powerful machines on the development of children’s worldviews. Half a century after Marshall McLuhan popularized the idea that “The medium is the message,” little has been done to examine the messages the computer sends to young children.

This paper takes on that task and finds that many of those messages are not healthy ones, especially for small children. The computer, which amplifies a child’s ability to control symbolic representations, also reduces the opportunities, inclinations and capacities for children to engage the world first hand. Perhaps more crucially, it tends to direct children’s efforts outward, toward employing tools to extend and increase their power, at the expense of developing the internal resources they need to make strong and deep connections with the living world around them.

I argue that this tendency is promoted by a technological ideology that has gradually come to dominate educational thinking in the U.S. While it has resulted in some undeniable benefits, it has also created a number of serious problems. Since technology expand human power but provides no guidance to moral or ethical growth, these human capacities, along with many others, must be more consciously and rigorously nurtured if children are to grow into healthy adulthood in a high tech society.

A set of guidelines if offered to help educators develop technology awareness and literacy programs that address these concerns with hopes that they ultimately may set our children on a course that leads out of the technological ideology into a more life promoting worldview.