Neil Postman would be saying, "I was trying to tell you what your love of technology would do...."


From an article in the NY Times....

Jack London was the subject in Daterrius Hamilton’s online English 3 course. In a high school classroom packed with computers, he read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”

Mr. Hamilton, who had failed English 3 in a conventional classroom and was hoping to earn credit online to graduate, was asked a question about the meaning of social Darwinism. He pasted the question into Google and read a summary of a Wikipedia entry. He copied the language, spell-checked it and e-mailed it to his teacher.

Mr. Hamilton, 18, is among the expanding ranks of students in kindergarten through Grade 12 — more than one million in the United States, by one estimate — taking online courses.


It's the future, I'm assured by so many. Maybe so, maybe so. I'll say it again, technology seems to prove that the downsides of something--anything-- are about equal in depth and intensity to the benefits of that thing.


We work pretty intensively with Call of the Wild in my 8th grade class, by the way.