Earlier today I read an article blaming technology for the decline in our youth and I found myself disagreeing. Technology may make it easier to not learn these things but critical thinking and reasoning is no longer part of the grade school curriculum and only marginally taught at a collegiate level.
If you look at the school curriculum from a century ago, the emphasis was different. Students learned to analyze and evaluate after reading or experimenting. It seems that the curriculum in most high schools today is more learning by rote and then regurgitating back so that students learn the answers to the questions and then just fill in the blank. Having observed directly and indirectly, teachers now instruct students with a curriculum designed to pass the test at the end of the year so the school can get its funding. There isn’t time or money to teach critical thought and reasoning - that is left to the parents and if the parents aren’t competent either then it just doesn’t get taught.
(Sue - this isn’t a criticism of schools; it is a no win situation in many cases and I feel that teachers and educators continually get the short end of the stick)
Technology can be a distraction but it is no more of a distraction to education than a host of other topics. The primer I have from around the turn of the century doesn’t cover anything about the technologies of the day but dwells more on mathematics, biology, history, language, literature, and physical sciences. It seems that technology of that era is a tool, a means to an end, not and end point.
As a long term software developer, manager, and writer, I’ve interviewed dozens of people for a variety of roles in our company. I’ve found that the most important skill is imagination followed by critical thinking. Software language and rules can be learned fairly easy but teaching someone to think is nearly impossible without lots of time and effort that I just don’t have.
Technology as a toy is just that, a toy, and shouldn’t interfere or have bearing on education. Technology as a means to an end in education should reinforce and support the content, not be the content unless the course work is about technology, such as a computer class.
In high school, I took a computer software class. It was fun, it was interesting and I didn’t take much away from it besides a familiarity with computers. At the time, I learned more at home with a copy of CP/M Basic and our dual floppy monochrome (green) Eagle CP/M computer that my dad used for his business. The best computer class I ever took was the first one I had at Utah State University. The first half of the course we didn’t touch a keyboard - it was all about algorithms and logic and it was the only class that concentrated on what you were doing with the tool rather than concentrating on the tool itself.
The Fortran, Pascal, Cobol, and VMS I learned taught me little bits but that algorithm class set the foundation for everyone of them and everything else since.
(I’ve wandered a bit from my original thesis - feel free to bring me to task for it as I’m not inclined at the moment to edit. )