In the July 9 online edition of The New York Times, Silicon Valley-based business professor Randall Stross published an article entitled Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality. He described some studies in which economists have been measuring a home computer’s impact on the school performance of children in low-income households. (Actually, he and the researchers he quotes refer to “educational impact” but there is, of course, little correlation between getting high scores on school tests and being educated.) Anyway, the researchers have concluded that there is “little or no educational benefit” to providing students with their own computers because they apparently resulted in declining test scores. Worse, they found that low-income kids’ test scores often decline more than their richer counterparts after the computers arrive.

The author begins by declaring his ignorance of how people learn, his sharing of our culture’s lack of respect for kids, and the education industry’s arrogant belief that there is little value to anything except what schools teach. He writes, “Middle school students are champion time-wasters. And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance. Put the two together at home, without hovering supervision, and logic suggests that you won’t witness a miraculous educational transformation.” And he ends on the same note: “How disappointing to read in the Texas study that ‘there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.’ When devising ways to beat school policing software, students showed an exemplary capacity for self-directed learning. Too bad that capacity didn’t expand in academic directions, too.”

Too bad Professor Stross doesn’t realize the irony in those two sentences. If the schools had put less effort into controlling learners and what they were supposed to learn, the students would have wasted less of their self-directed energy. I wonder what he and the researchers would say about the education unschooled life learning kids give themselves at home with computers and without “hovering supervision” (not to mention their satisfaction levels). No matter what sort of manipulation, supervision or technology is directed at the educational process, people learn what they want and need to learn. And that’s an education – whether business professors, schools, and educational researchers like it or not.