Don Larson linked to a CNN article about computers in education. The article basically opposes some exposing young children to computers in the school environment. Since I’m going to buy daughter a computer for her fourth birthday, I disagree strongly with the “keep small kids away from computers” line, but on the other hand I’m not very impressed by schools’ use of computers.
To put it bluntly, the problem from my experience isn’t the computers, it’s the schools. The biggest problem is that public schools tend to take the approaches to teaching other subjects that don’t work for those subjects and that really don’t work for computers.
One school district in Michigan, for example, developed an elaborate plan for making children computer literate that started in the earliest grades and went through high school. The problem? The entire curriculum basically involved extensive long-term training in two software packages that are available only on a single platform. I can’t think of a worse way to teach kids about computers.
The big problem is that most computer instruction treats computers as a tool to complete specific tasks rather than a general purpose tool like the encyclopedia or dictionary that kids should have a broad understanding of how to use. A lot of computer instruction that I’ve seen the next door neighbors bring home, for example, goes down to the level of telling kids exactly which menu selection to pick in IE4 or something along those lines.
On the other hand, it is foolish to go to the other extreme and not give young kids access to computers. We’ve got four functioning computers in my home (and several nonfunctioning ones in the basement) and our 3-year-old is intensely curious about them. She regularly asks me to see the pictures of her that are on her web site, and recently became fascinated with watching her mom play The Sims (now she asks mom to show her the “little people” who live inside the computer and “helps” Lisa play the game).