Dumming down the children....

asaratis

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Jun 20, 2009
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This article presents plausible argument that our school children are being systematically numbed to reality. I am thankful that my schooling including field trips, the reading of novels and Greek classics, and extracurricular activities rather than drugs and electronic media meant to calm and entertain restless students.

The teachers in today's babysitting institutions are real WIMPS compared to those in the days before drugs and electronics were made available to enable anyone to be a "teacher" despite their inability to actually teach.

Asia Times Online :: How America made its children crazy


Now we know that computers don't help children learn and that drugs don't help them concentrate, because the establishment mandarins who sold us the computers and drugs have conceded failure. In the January 29 New York Times, [1] a prominent professor of child development shows that attention-deficit-disorder drugs only harm the three million children who take them. One out of 10 American children have been diagnosed with so-called Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and most of them have been medicated. [2]

Some months ago, the Times reported that test scores lagged in school districts that invested massively in digital education. [3] It does not seem to have occurred to the mandarins that computers cause attention deficit disorder.
 
This article presents plausible argument that our school children are being systematically numbed to reality. I am thankful that my schooling including field trips, the reading of novels and Greek classics, and extracurricular activities rather than drugs and electronic media meant to calm and entertain restless students.

The teachers in today's babysitting institutions are real WIMPS compared to those in the days before drugs and electronics were made available to enable anyone to be a "teacher" despite their inability to actually teach.

Asia Times Online :: How America made its children crazy


Now we know that computers don't help children learn and that drugs don't help them concentrate, because the establishment mandarins who sold us the computers and drugs have conceded failure. In the January 29 New York Times, [1] a prominent professor of child development shows that attention-deficit-disorder drugs only harm the three million children who take them. One out of 10 American children have been diagnosed with so-called Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and most of them have been medicated. [2]

Some months ago, the Times reported that test scores lagged in school districts that invested massively in digital education. [3] It does not seem to have occurred to the mandarins that computers cause attention deficit disorder.

Which part of this was "made up"?
 
Computers cause ADD?

Do you think that the fact that teachers are not even allowed to raise their voices when discipline is concerned might be a factor?

Do they still make those suckers called Dum Dums?
 
Since I am married to a long long time teacher there is a case to be made that the dummies are willing participants in their dumbness. We often hear from old timers that things are different, often worse than when they lived, could there be a truth here? I love talking to older managers today and laugh when I hear how attitudes have changed. One told me lots of his yoots would be off this past Monday. Maybe laziness is a virtue today?

[ame=http://www.amazon.com/High-Tech-Heretic-Reflections-Contrarian/dp/0385489757/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8]Amazon.com: High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian (9780385489751): Clifford Stoll: Books[/ame]


How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think? | 2010 Annual Question | Edge

"We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end." Lewis Mumford

"Rather than bringing me closer to others, the time that I spend online isolates me from the most important people in my life, my family, my friends, my neighbourhood, my community." Clifford Stoll

"There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory." Neil Postman

"Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences." Lewis Mumford

"By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed." Lewis Mumford
 
The usefulness of computers in education was demonstrated long before the Internet became popular. But our educators do not advertise that demonstration.

Bennett

The funny thing about that case is that the teachers made no objections because the did not want to be bothered with the trouble making students. Now the teachers seem to want to keep this swept under a rug.

But the economics of the computer industry has changed since then. In 1987 a a good desktop computer was still close to $3,000. Now a $300 laptop is more powerful. The technology is actually a threat to the education industry if properly implemented but the education bureaucracy makes the decisions about how to spend money on the technology. So what is the computer industry going to do?

I think the cheap computers are so powerful that more powerful ones won;'t be any better for education. It is all about the software. But how dp manufacturers make money on that. Even Microsoft needs useless operating system upgrades to keep the cash coming in. Grades school and high school kids could have kept using Windows XP. It is the educational application software that matters not the operating system.

psik
 

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