Technology not the panacea for education

A very interesting article on the value of technology in the classroom. 

Educators have been trying to improve schools with every technology we've ever invented, beginning with Thomas Edison's promise, in 1912, to create "100 percent efficiency" in the classroom through the medium of "the motion picture." Since personal computers and the Internet first arrived in classrooms, in the early 1990s, schools have spent approximately $100 billion on technology. Throughout this campaign, educators and the technology industry have been searching madly for solid evidence of whether the computers were boosting achievement. So little has been found that this data has become education's WMD.

It seems that many educators and lawmakers feel that cutting edge technology will save our school system.  The future employers, however, are looking for something much more basic.

First, the wiser captains of industry have never asked schools to emphasize "technology skills." What they prefer, and are in fact dying for to better compete in a global economy, are graduates with skills in areas that increasingly get neglected: writing and reasoning; reliable work habits; the capacity for concentration and face-to-face communication; a sense of history, cultural anthropology, and - for jobs in the technology sector in particular - higher math and science. "Want to get a job using information technology to solve problems?," a report from the Information Technology Association of America, once asked. "Know something about the problems that need to be solved."

Technology is just a tool.  It cannot completely replace a rigorous, well rounded education.

Full article: San Francisco Chronicle