A crisp critique of the impact of computers on children’s minds by educator Healy (Your Child’s Growing Mind, 1990. etc.), who contends that, in our fervor to embrace computers, we have overlooked their potential to harm youth, particularly young children. Drawing on extensive interviews with school administrators, teachers, parents, and children themselves, Healy concludes that the problems caused by excessive computer use are staggering: Among regular users, for example, visual impairment is now the norm, and hard- core cyberchildren, lacking sufficient physical exercise, as a result also grow up less fit mentally than their parents. Even more disturbing is the potential impact on brain development, since the processes of thinking aloud, questioning, creative problem-solving, and communicating will be inevitably downplayed by those who rely on computers to process data. Despite the shrill alarm she sounds, Healy doesn—t dismiss computers outright, and she maintains that, used moderately and guardedly, they can enrich young people’s lives: When 125 “at-risk” students in New York City were given home computers with online hookups, for example, Internet-research began to substitute for television viewing and severely withdrawn pupils began to communicate with one another online. For in-school use, the perfect model, in Healy’s view, is the Gold River Discovery School outside Sacramento, Calif. Here, students who use computers are “continually coached on how to take responsibility and reflect on their learning.” Hands-on learning always precedes computer use, and virtual reality is never allowed to take the place of genuine experience. Throughout, Healy intersperses her assessment with practical advice: She urges parents and educators to be wary of software that is overly stimulating to the senses alone, to avoid programs that give “rewards” for completing tasks, and to be on guard that children don—t avoid playing with friends in favor of spending more time interacting with their computers. A timely and sensible challenge to the prevalent notion that computers necessarily enhance mental development and learning. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83136-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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