This article, Poorer Reading Skills Following Changed Computer Habits of Children, discusses a study in which the reading abilities of children have deteriorated since 1970 in two countries in which children use computers more often in school and outside of school. That is, reading ability “has fallen rapidly since 1991 in both the US and Sweden.” On the other hand, “[r]eading ability has improved steadily in Italy and Hungary,” where students don’t use computers heavily in school or outside of school.
As I’ve noted repeatedly, we shape our minds by actively responding to the world. We can misshape our minds by actively responding in the wrong way or to a misconception of the world. We can even misshape our minds by passively accepting what a television or computer pushes into our heads. We become literate human beings capable of maintaining and reviving a complex civilization, like that of the West, by reading books and learning how to think in the ways of the good authors. This doesn’t mean I’m much impressed by the books used in the American school systems for sure. There is much improvement that could be made, starting with tossing out textbooks in many subjects, such as history, at least for talented students who would be better off spending a school-year reading two or three serious works of narrative history and writing a number of short papers on specific topics in those books. Even in mathematics, “written-for-school” textbooks are used too heavily for the development of good mathematical reasoning skills. That is one of several problems in modern education which deserve a book’s worth of discussion and I’m not the one to write any of those books.
For the most part, the study discussed in this article, Poorer Reading Skills Following Changed Computer Habits of Children, speaks for itself, but I will try to balance any counter-reaction by saying computers can play a very good role in education when used properly. If students of some talent in mathematical reasoning are learning how to program or how the ‘insides’ of the computer actually work, then some real learning is going on. This would include future car mechanics who would be better off working in the way of members of the mechanics crews for racing-car teams — learning how to program chips to change the behavior of the engines and thus learning more about how a modern engine works.
Another example: if future writers or editors or book-designers were learning how to do computer typesetting, using perhaps the typesetting system LaTeX designed by Donald Knuth, then they would be learning something serious even if they later moved to radically different ways of typesetting books or e-books. Even if they came to believe that Knuth did a lot of things wrong, they’d have learned a lot just to reason to that conclusion.
And there have reportedly been good results from using computers in the education of students with autism or other conditions which involve problems interacting with other human beings.
I wouldn’t make an absolute rule that computers should be banished from schools, but any use of computers should be specifically justified by the development of meaningful skills, not those which merely make them targets for marketing campaigns by companies selling systems for dummies. Most students, in fact, would be far better off learning the basics of reading and ‘rithmetic and ‘riting. Chemical engineers need those skills as much as lawyers and as much as conscientious citizens trying to learn a little about the wars their country is fighting in their name.