Continued Opposition To Laptops in Schools 528
theskeptic writes "The WSJ has an article about opposition to programs that provide laptops to 6-8th grade kids. Detractors say that the kids are wasting too much time online browsing dangerous sites, instant messaging friends, and posting to Myspace. Parents are worried that serious learning is being neglected in the quest to 'dazzle up presentations with fancy fonts instead of digging through library books.' Some parents however are 'enthusiastic laptop proponents,' one saying the laptop has helped her twelve-year-old son 'master critical professional skills like how to compile a PowerPoint presentation.'" Gaaah.
On transcending compulsory schooling (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.unschooling.com/ [unschooling.com]
and upgrade libraries and turn school buildings into learning centers (or democratically run "free schools"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_school [wikipedia.org]
for those children whose parents cannot afford to supervise their children during the day directly).
See for example John Holt's writings:
http://www.holtgws.com/index.html [holtgws.com]
or John Taylor Gatto's:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ [johntaylorgatto.com]
or any of many other radical school reformers.
All your suggestions sound good on paper but miss the point that people have tried for decades to reform schools incrementally and they are still broken -- or rather, they actually are still performing the mission they were designed for, which is dumbing kids down into compliant workers, obedient soldiers, and gullible consumers so they will fit well into a well ordered industrial economy, a mission now obsolete in a post-industrial and post-scarcity information age.
The future is not to still idealize Prussia and even earlier empire building aspirations back to Plato
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=2
which developed these techniques of "education" but instead to look into the future, where people start asking questions like "why work?"
http://www.whywork.org/ [whywork.org]
and how to structure an economy when "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain":
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html [gnu.org]
(Sorry to read about your loss, and it sounds like you were doing a lot of great things together, just needed more time to go even further.)