Too Old To Fix Our Schools? by Sherry Miller, Oldest Woman on the Web?

Too Old to Fix Our Schools?
Sherry Miller,
Oldest Woman on the Web August, 1997

When I plunged into new media, the internet and the web, I allowed myself to avoid education, learning materials and just plain kids. I had started two schools and worked for five or six more over a twenty-five year period, so I figured my role in education was fulfilled.

Meanwhile since I joined the online revolution six years ago, reading scores plummet, history disappears from children's lives, math travels out of the mind into the computer, and solutions for our children's futures disappear.

At an early multimedia convention in 1992, I heard some good news. Two of the prominent speakers were men in their late thirties or early forties who had five-year-old children. This old grandma knows that people who don't give a damn about schools and education often become fanatics the minute they have one of those bratty six-year-olds who can read. Suddenly they take into their own hands the entire re-organization of all the schools they can find, especially the ones their little readers are likely to attend.

This burst of energy lasts until the kids are about 12 or 13, when those concerned parents usually opt for traditional values and a beeline to Harvard or Stanford. Life-drawing, theater, film making, etc., get put aside for activities like basketball that look good on the record or SAT (college admissions tests) boosters.

While these Silicon Valley executives are gradually gearing up for their own personal educational philosophical evolution and PTA control systems, a large number of normal people including many teachers continues to find its way to the internet and the web. All this activity sets the stage for omni-present debates about computers and education.

I attended a recent informal symposium at the home of a computer industry leader, commentator and renegade. He and his wife, at their quarterly 'salon,' hosted a conversation on computers and education. A youngish teacher was reading at length from an article about the inability of computers to replace the teacher in the classroom. Other people spoke about the role of socialization in school life. Others addressed the many limitations of computers in the learning process. Everyone in the room connected with education seemed to be talking about the faults of computer based learning.

I wanted to bring my quarter-century experience with education to the conversation, but I was hearing a lot of paranoia from the teachers about the role of the computer. Finally I ventured forward with my one comment about the possible age of the person who wrote the article declaiming computers in the classroom. I prosposed that if the author were over fifty, it really wasn't a valid argument because that writer had a personal agenda.

I feel confident assuming that well over 50% of our school administrators must be over fifty years old. By administrators I mean principals, superintendents and other decision-makers in our children's school systems. In addition, many parents today, in the upper and middle class school districts where educational standards are created, are older in their child-bearing years than they have been in previous generations.

But let's talk about the administrators. As I see it, the school systems are controlled by people who have been fearful of computers most of their lives. If PCs came into general use about ten years ago, these administrators could easily have continued well up to 1992 or 93 without ever using a computer. Even more inhibiting than late adoption of new technologies is the fear of technologies that most of us were raised with. Anyone who has mentioned getting a computer to their 'senior' parents has experienced this resistence and fear.

Administrators who are unlikely to be enthusiastic computer users themselves are certainly not going to be advocates of computers in the schools. This is where I see the bottleneck and conflict between computers, teachers, education and kids.

Anyone, teacher or not, who loves the internet and computers can find a hundred ways to interest and teach kids with computers. Just as all of us computer users learn from one another, from books, from classes, and from just plain using the computers, kids and teachers can and do learn to incorporate the computer into the learning process. There is no real issue here any more than there is when a teacher shows a student how to use the library.

What is creating the debate about learning and computers is the great army of over-fifty administrators and those teachers of any age who are computer-phobic or who are just plain uncomfortable with computers. They also have the specific fear of being replaced by computers, which seems an absurd fear for any computer user.

Can you imagine for a moment that if we had great summer camps in Hawaii where we brought the over-fifty public school administrators and gave them two weeks of sun, fun, and computer training, how that experience would influence the use of computers in our schools?

Or perhaps we can just wait ten years until we get some adminstrators in place who have spent ten or twenty years on the computer and understand its role as a tool, as an unlimited resource, as an open window on the world of the mind and the world of the planet.

Contrary to the idea of creating great new learning-based software for kids, I believe the great advantage of the internet and computer is that children can wander freely in the world of adults and learn as quickly as they wish from real-world (real computer world that is) experiences. For example, we don't have to create a program or website about filmography or physics and consciousness just aimed at children. They can explore the existing sites on the web and absorb as much as their level of learning lets them take in.

This process is similar to what we over-fifties did when we went to the public library as children and used adult books to do research for school papers. We didn't use children's books. And we took away the ideas we could absorb.

The problem isn't special software for children, although that will come because it's a billion dollar industry (as in textbooks). The problem is educating the administrator/teacher community in the joys of the computer, its potential and the actual experience of using the computer to learn.

Miller went from zero to guru on the computer after age 50. Prior to that, she founded a Montessori school and an alternative arts school in New York City. In Maine she helped found a children's school and grow and fund an alternative college. She has at least three grown well-educated children.

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