CAN COMPUTERS FREE TEACHERS TO TEACH MORE CREATIVELY?
At a party of a friend recently I got into a discussion with someone about education and the use of computer technology. The person I was conversing with suggested that educational software could and should be developed to relieve teachers of the technical aspects of teaching. Why should each teacher have to figure out how to teach reading or arithmetic when the best minds could solve that problem and create a computer program to teach the children these basic skills? Having software relieve teachers of this technical aspect of teaching, he argued, would free teachers to do the work that needed human interaction teaching critical and creative thinking. This suggestion makes me uncomfortable.
We agree that helping students to learn to use their minds well, in critical and creative ways, is given far too little attention in the large majority of classrooms. This is especially true in classrooms serving low-income and minority students. Because these students generally do less well on standardized tests, the schools that serve them are pressured to focus on raising those test scores.
