"These teaching machines direct students away from reading, away from writing, away from scholarship." ( )

Rarely has a sacred cow been bludgeoned as gleefully as Clifford Stoll hammers educational computing in his smart and funny 1999 book High Tech Heretic. With equal parts unbridled passion and wry wit, Stoll challenges the conventional wisdom that the creation of high tech classrooms "wired for the 21st century" is an inherently good idea.
Perhaps surprisingly, Stoll is not some anti-technology hippie who spends his time hugging trees, reading Thoreau, and sending menacing letters to corporations from his crude Montana cabin. On the contrary, Stoll's arguments are given increased credibility when we discover that he is a self-confessed computer nerd who has worked for decades in the computer industry.

Many of Stoll's arguments will find a welcoming audience even among pro-computer educators. For example, the most powerful chapter in the book is an indictment of the school-as-entertainment model entitled "Makes Learning Fun." "Most learning isn't fun" Stoll argues. "Learning takes work. Discipline. Commitment, from both teacher and student . . . Turning learning into fun denigrates the most important things we can do in life: to learn and to teach." Yeah, Clifford! You go, boy!

Stoll waxes equally eloquently on the annihilation of basic math skills encouraged by the use of calculators, the myth advocated by fans of the Internet that "information is power," and the diversion of library dollars from books to glitzy high tech gadgets that are often obsolete before they are torn out of the box. Stoll's stridency (and he is strident) is leavened by his sense of humor. Not only does he describe how he converted his old Macintosh computer into an aquarium, he even throws in his recipe for banana bread for good measure.

Undoubtedly, Stoll's arguments are a bit overdone. He has not only pointed out that the emperor has no clothes. He has taunted him, smacked his bottom, photographed him, and downloaded his naked pictures to the Internet. The truth is that, used judiciously, computers do have a place in the classroom. The fact that an election map for every presidential election in U.S. history is only a keystroke away can't be a bad thing. Despite Stoll's argument to the contrary, a sense of balance is exactly what is needed. But then, if Stoll was not so zealous, High Tech Heretic wouldn't be nearly so much fun. ( )