Education and Computers

Computers have proven to be immensely useful tools for educators and students, and they are now considered to be an essential component of primary and secondary education in the United States. However, the computerization of schools has raised a number of pressing issues: unequal access to machines and resources, the commercialization of school curricula, teachers' responses to computing, and a whole host of other pedagogical issues.

Although computers had made occasional appearances in American schools during the 1970s, it was in the 1980s that they became a major issue in education. In 1980, for instance, an elite private high school made headlines in Fortune magazine by requiring its students to purchase and use computers. By 1982, the use of computers in schools was a more widespread phenomenon in upper-middle-class and upper-class school districts.

From the beginning, many forces conspired to get computers into schools and classrooms. The computer industry made students and education a priority, in part because they knew that they could get lifelong customers if they caught them young. Education was also conceived as a major computer market early on. By 1984, Forbes magazine was estimating the educational computing market to be worth billions of dollars in revenue. Some computer manufacturers, like Apple and Hewlett-Packard, ran educational promotions.

For the most part, higher-income school districts were the first to be equipped with computers. But income was not the only significant factor. An American Demographics survey showed that even low-income families were disposed toward buying computers if their children used them in school. Since American schools were heavily segregated by race, the inequalities of neighborhood were reproduced in cyberspace. Now called the digital divide, this unequal access to and interest in computing was a side effect of the ways in which computers were marketed to educators. Even where districts found the money for computers, there were still important resource issues. Computer budgets were often placed in competition with allocations for other resources like library books or textbooks—and, in some cases, even teacher salaries.

A major thrust of computer education has been computer literacy, the idea that students needed to have a basic set of competencies in computing. While basic reading and writing skills are generally agreed upon as standards for traditional literacy, there is a much wider range of opinion on the question of computer literacy. Some educators believe that it is enough to teach students how to run and use basic programs for word processing, Internet use, spreadsheets, and so forth. Others believe that computer literacy requires some basic knowledge of programming as well.

Regardless of one's definition of computer literacy, a number of other factors will influence students' facilities with computers. Students who excel at reading, writing, and math will tend to excel at computing as well; students who have access to a keyboard outside the classroom will learn to type more quickly. There is also a debate among educators as to the proper age for introducing computers into the curriculum. Some argue that students should start very young on computers—at kindergarten age or earlier. Others argue that students should pass through a few years of schooling before computers are significantly integrated into the curriculum.

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