The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved by Todd Oppenheimer

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 14 No. 1 (2004) ISSN: 1546-2250 The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved Oppenheimer, Todd (2003). New York: Random House; 481 pages. $26.95 (hard). ISBN 1400060443. This isn't a book about the mind, flickering or not. It's a book about educational policy and its implementation. As the subtitle says, Oppenheimer feels that technology offers only a 'false promise' to schools, and that real progress in education must come in other ways. People convinced that technology has real promise for education, or people who wonder whether they should be convinced, will find Oppenheimer's presentation sobering. Oppenheimer has visited many schools and researched (in the journalistic sense) a lot of programs. The stories that he tells about them illustrate over and over again a pattern of high hopes, uncritical planning and investment, slipshod implementation, and negligible (and sometimes actually negative)results. The stories include struggling, poor schools that diverted money from basic needs to pay for Internet connections that didn't work. They also include ballyhooed demonstration projects with oodles of money that yielded student work that was all glitz and no substance. Oppenheimer has a lot to say about how this has happened. He shows that the pattern is not new, but has repeated itself whenever anew technology appears that seems relevant to education: movies, radio, television. He shows how the optimists of technology consistently overestimate benefits and grossly underestimate, or just plain ignore, costs. (Advocates of computer technology can and should learn a lot from Oppenheimer's stories about what it would cost to make systems really work in schools that lack skilled personnel and whose staff are already greatly overcommitted.) He shows how commercial interests promote unrealistic programs, and obtain 271 support for them through the political process (people make money, sometimes a lot of money, selling technology to schools). Readers attracted to the second part of the subtitle, 'How Learning Can Be Saved,' may be disappointed. The author mainly devotes the second part of the book to discussing Waldorf Schools. (The Flickering Mind is an expansion of two Atlantic Monthly features, one about educational technology and one about Waldorf Schools.) Waldorf Schools, growing out of the educational thought and work of Rudolf Steiner in 1920s Germany, offer many interesting contrasts with mainstream schools: reading comes late, in a relaxed way; music and visual art are emphasized, as are cultural and spiritual values, and there's little technology. Oppenheimer likes these schools and has some interesting stories about how they are working in some unpromising settings: not in wealthy, well-educated suburbs, but in juvenile correctional facilities or desperately poor city neighborhoods. There may be promise in this, but the necessary facts and analysis are not included in Oppenheimer's presentation to justify a prescription for 'saving learning.' The part of the book that has attracted attention, mostly positive, is the first part, the critique of technology in the schools. I've already said that the news is bad, and that technology advocates should be sobered. But some advocates will not be fazed. Technology is a moving target, and any amount of trouble or disappointment can be chalked upto teething problems and immaturity. Surely no school today could have the problems with the Internet that Oppenheimer talks about, could they, since the infrastructure is so much better? Or, if there are still a few problems, soon they'll disappear, won't they? Surely schools have to tough it out, or become irrelevant in a relentlessly technologizing world? Resolving these questions requires refining Oppenheimer's stories of trouble to get at a deeper level of analysis: how many of the troubles Oppenheimer reports are problems of deployment, and how many are problems of inherent 272 limitations in the value of technology? If one could wave a wand and make all the systems out there perform as intended, would kids be better off as a result? Oppenheimer doesn't analyze the troubles he reports in just this way, but it is clear that he thinks there are serious problems that will survive even if problems of deployment could somehow be overcome...