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Book Review: The Flickering Mind

THE FLICKERING MIND:
The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom
And How Learning Can Be Saved
by Todd Oppenheimer
(Random House, 512 pages, $26.95)

Oppenheimer, a contributing writer for the Atlantic Monthly, spent three years visiting schools across the country, trying to determine the extent to which the technological revolution has reshaped American education. What he concludes in this sprawling and devastating book is that technolology has indeed had a huge impact, but mostly in ways that seriously undermine teaching and learning.

Oppenheimer estimates that at least $90 billion was spent on technology in schools in the 1990s, often at the expense of decimated music, art, and extracurricular programs. Nevertheless, glitches often are the order of the day. A computer crash in the middle of a key lesson, an Internet search on wildlife that leads students to the Black Bear Bar & Grill, software that becomes obsolete shortly after it's installed—this is all standard fare, especially in the least wealthy school districts.

But even in the most technologically sophisticated schools, things rarely work according to expectations. For instance, one teacher walking from workstation to workstation observes students entering data into spreadsheets; Oppenheimer, later strolling about on his own, sees the same students exchanging e-mail gossip and visiting entertainment Web sites. This kind of experience is repeated in school after school. "The differences between what the teacher saw and what I saw on my own," he summarizes, "were so dramatic that it was hard to keep from laughing."

Oppenheimer's critique, however, involves much more than gullible teachers and flighty students. His primary concern is that technology, with its endless stream of distracting and easy-to-manipulate images and data, unwittingly fosters a "flickering mind" that loses the will to struggle with difficult problems or challenging texts. One student in West Virginia, for example, says he likes to use the Internet for research because "you don't have to read it or anything....All you have to do is just use your fingers and just look."

Oppenheimer's examination of the much-touted New Technology High in Napa, California, is particularly revealing. This small and well-funded public school, which draws visitors from across the nation, has the best of everything; its students use the ubiquitous technology to churn out dazzling PowerPoint and multimedia presentations. But the results, Oppenheimer argues, tend to be content-light, as evidenced by a project on Vietnam that features rich graphics but very little history.

It's no wonder that schools like New Technology are almost devoid of books: Who needs them when the entire world is online? But this belief, the author suggests, leaves students unanchored in the comprehensive worldview that a good book provides. Online, kids areat the mercy of images and "facts" that are here today, gone tomorrow. They're lost in Plato's cave, mistaking the flickering shadows in front of them for reality.

Oppenheimer does acknowledge that computers have a place in the classroom. He also convincingly argues, however, that "life's fancy tools" should be used only at the top of the learning pyramid and that at the lower, more fundamental levels, students should do the work of acquiring knowledge and enriching their intellectual capacities. To this end, he insists, they need to immerse themselves in the tactile world of handheld tools—paper and pen, for example.

One of Oppenheimer's sources, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, perhaps best encapsulates the author's own point of view. "In most cases," he says in an interview, "the computer programs the kids and not the other way around."


— David Ruenzel
Teacher Magazine
2003-11-
http://www.teachermagazine.org/tmstory.cfm?slug=03Review.h15

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