{"product_id":"the-flickering-mind-isbn-9780812968439","title":"The Flickering Mind","description":"The Flickering Mind, by National Magazine Award winner Todd Oppenheimer, is a landmark account of the failure of technology to improve our schools and a call for renewed emphasis on what really works.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmerican education faces an unusual moment of crisis. For decades, our schools have been beaten down by a series of curriculum fads, empty crusades for reform, and stingy funding. Now education and political leaders have offered their biggest and most expensive promise ever—the miracle of computers and the Internet—at a cost of approximately $70 billion just during the decade of the 1990s. Computer technology has become so prevalent that it is transforming nearly every corner of the academic world, from our efforts to close the gap between rich and poor, to our hopes for school reform, to our basic methods of developing the human imagination. Technology is also recasting the relationships that schools strike with the business community, changing public beliefs about the demands of tomorrow’s working world, and reframing the nation’s systems for researching, testing, and evaluating achievement.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAll this change has led to a culture of the flickering mind, and a generation teetering between two possible futures. In one, youngsters have a chance to become confident masters of the tools of their day, to better address the problems of tomorrow. Alternatively, they can become victims of commercial novelties and narrow measures of ability, underscored by misplaced faith in standardized testing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt this point, America’s students can’t even make a fair choice. They are an increasingly distracted lot. Their ability to reason, to listen, to feel empathy, is quite literally flickering. Computers and their attendant technologies did not cause all these problems, but they are quietly accelerating them. In this authoritative and impassioned account of the state of education in America, Todd Oppenheimer shows why it does not have to be this way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOppenheimer visited dozens of schools nationwide—public and private, urban and rural—to present the compelling tales that frame this book. He consulted with experts, read volumes of studies, and came to strong and persuasive conclusions: that the essentials of learning have been gradually forgotten and that they matter much more than the novelties of technology. He argues that every time we computerize a science class or shut down a music program to pay for new hardware, we lose sight of what our priority should be: “enlightened basics.” Broad in scope and investigative in treatment, The Flickering Mind will not only contribute to a vital public conversation about what our schools can and should be—it will define the debate.“This is the most important book of its kind since Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, and it carries the same torch—telling us what’s really going on inside the public education system. The Flickering Mind is a powerful work and a must-read for anyone who cares what will be within the minds of the next generation of Americans.”\u003cbr\u003e—Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic, author of The Progress Paradox\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Todd Oppenheimer brings two great strengths to the subject he explores in The Flickering Mind: an understanding of technology’s possibilities and limitations, and an appreciation for the day-by-day realities of the way children learn. He also has a good eye for what is working, and why, in the classroom—and for what is hucksterish in the sales tactics used to promote high-tech learning. The combination makes The Flickering Mind authoritative and original, clear in its main message but also nuanced and fair.”\u003cbr\u003e—James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, author of Breaking the News\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Todd Oppenheimer addresses the implications of computers in the classroom in a work of impressive scholarship and balanced judgment. He reviews evidence of how political leaders and some ambitious educators have ‘oversold’ the value of computers at the cost of the human features of learning, the challenge and excitement of teacher-student interaction, and the stimulation of imagination. This is a provocative but potentially constructive contribution to education for our time.”\u003cbr\u003e—Jerome L. Singer, Ph.D., professor of psychology and child study at Yale University, co-editor of Handbook of Children and the Media\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A splendid book, humane and smart, with the authority that comes only from lots of patient reporting. For those who care about children, this is an important—and impressively sensible—guide to what has gone wrong with schools and how we can put matters right, if parents and educators can get free of inflated promises.”\u003cbr\u003e—William Greider, National Book Award nominee, author of The Soul of CapitalismTodd Oppenheimer won the 1998 National Magazine Award for his Atlantic Monthly story on this subject and has received numerous other awards during roughly twenty-five years in journalism, for both his writing and his investigative reporting. His articles have appeared in various local and national publications, including Newsweek, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, and National Journal. He lives with his wife, Anh, and his son, A.J., in San Francisco.\u003cb\u003eCHAPTER 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEducation’s History of Technotopia\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Ibelieve that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our  educational system,” Thomas Edison said in 1922, “and that in a few  years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. I  should say that on the average we get only about two percent efficiency  out of textbooks as they are written today.” A decade earlier, Edison  had been even more pedagogically expansive, saying that film makes it  “possible to touch every branch of human knowledge.” Now he added: “The  education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the  medium of the motion picture, a visualized education, where it should be  possible to obtain one hundred percent efficiency.” Three years later,  Edison’s vision was undiluted: “In ten years textbooks as the principal  medium of teaching will be as obsolete as the horse and carriage are  now. . . . There is no limitation to the camera.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlmost as curious as this snippet of grandiose soothsaying from one of  America’s greatest inventors is the context in which it was presented.  Edison’s outlook was reported in a 1939 book, by which time the author  had already found reason to be skeptical of technologists’ promises to  schools. The book was entitled Motion Pictures As an Aid In Teaching  American History, by Harry Arthur Wise, who used Edison’s quotes to  prove an axiom. “Like many new educative devices,” Wise wrote, “the  motion picture was received into the school with a confidence and an  enthusiasm not well founded.” Educators’ faith in films was particularly  unjustifiable, Wise asserted, because it was “more far-reaching and  all-inclusive than can be justified by the findings of more recent  educational research.” Wise, a specialist on this subject, arrived at  this conclusion after reviewing seven previous studies of teaching  through films and finding mixed results; he then conducted his own  study, which carefully used equivalent experimental and control groups  and other measures of scientific validity current at the time. Here’s  what he found: The group treated to films did the best, with test gains  deemed “statistically significant.” The films proved particularly  valuable in engaging the students’ imagination and in giving them a  sense of the historical atmosphere of the period. The boys benefited  more than the girls did. The films encouraged low-ability students to  learn factual information while helping high-ability students in  “acquiring spirit and atmosphere.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOverall, however, Wise found the benefit of classroom films so dependent  on the circumstances—the particular subject matter, the course  objectives, the students’ knowledge base, and the skill of the  teacher—that they could be endorsed only for use “as a supplement.” Nor,  Wise counseled, should teachers feel pressured to abandon their normal  routines. “The teacher who is interested in making effective use of any  type of visual aid does not need to assume that existing courses of  study should be thrown aside and that new units should be built up  around particular devices.” Not surprisingly, Wise closed by stressing  the need for better teacher training. The film, he noted, “is not  self-operating and its use requires much time for preparation if it is  to function effectively.” Instructing teachers in how to do just that,  he said, “is a matter of paramount importance . . .” As the years  progressed, most schools did not follow Wise’s advice. Classroom  films—as most of us remember—eventually became a rare occurrence,  treated more as a welcome moment of relaxation and entertainment than a  study aid.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1945, six years after Wise’s book came out, William Levenson, the  director of the Cleveland public schools’ radio station, had a whole new  technological vision. He claimed that “the time may come when a portable  radio receiver will be as common in the classroom as is the blackboard.  Radio instruction will be integrated into school life as an accepted  educational medium.” It wasn’t long before the famous psychologist B.  F. Skinner joined the chorus. “I was soon saying,” Skinner observed  while reflecting on the first days of one of his great inventions—the  behavioral “teaching machines” of the late 1950s and early 1960s—“that,  with the help of teaching machines and programmed instruction, students  could learn twice as much in the same time and with the same effort as  in a standard classroom.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSoon after the teaching machines’ moment in the sun, President Lyndon  Johnson spoke, in 1968, to a school in American Samoa about the next  technological hope. The “one requirement for a good and universal  education,” Johnson said, “is an inexpensive and readily available means  of teaching children. Unhappily, the world has only a fraction of the  teachers it needs. Samoa has met this problem through educational  television.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJohnson’s remarks were something of an understatement. Education in  American Samoa was in such a shambles that students were being taught in  antiquated one-room schools, and not a single teacher on the island  possessed a teaching certificate from the U.S. mainland. In response,  Samoa’s governor, H. Rex Lee, had made the overhaul of the school system  his top priority. In so doing, Lee rejected the standard  solutions—pouring money into the school system, retooling the  curriculum, hiring mainland teachers, and retraining Samoan  instructors—all of which had been recommended by his aides and by local  educators. But Lee wanted fast and total change. So he set out to invest  in television. In 1964, Congress came to Lee’s aid, giving American  Samoa $1 million for a system of televised instruction—an amount  equivalent to approximately $200 per student. Two years later, four of  every five Samoan students were spending from a quarter to a third of  their class time watching TV. The rest of their day was spent preparing  for the telecasts and, later, following up with activities related to  the shows they’d watched.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnfortunately, the proliferation of classroom televisions in American  Samoa far outpaced indications of academic achievement. By 1972, three  out of four high school teachers and administrators wanted to cut back  heavily on classroom telecasts, and over half the elementary school  students and 70 percent of the high school students agreed with them.  Samoan policy makers soon began returning more control for school  management to the teachers, which did not bode well for the TV campaign.  In 1979, Wilbur Schramm, a mass-communications specialist, concluded  that classroom telecasts had been relegated to “a supplemental  enrichment service, to be used when and if the teacher decided it was  appropriate.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBack on the mainland, the attitude toward televised learning was on a  similar trajectory. By 1961, $20 million had been invested in classroom  television by the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of  Education. A year later, President John F. Kennedy plowed another $32  million into the venture. As of 1971, public and private sources had  spent a total of $100 million on classroom TV.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe reader of this abbreviated history will undoubtedly notice the  parallels to today’s hot classroom technology. One could rewrite each of  these anecdotes, substituting the word computers for the words motion  pictures or radios or televisions and most people would think they were  recent news reports. Not too many years ago, in fact, President Bill  Clinton was in the news with his own rendition of technology’s old song.  In 1995, during his second presidential campaign, he pitched the nation  on “a bridge to the twenty-first century . . . where computers are as  much a part of the classroom as blackboards.” Despite the fact that this  latest technological messiah was estimated at the time to cost somewhere  between $40 billion and $100 billion over the next five years, Clinton’s  Republican adversaries were happy to sing along. Newt Gingrich, talking  about computers to the Republican National Committee as Speaker of the  House in 1996, said, “We could do so much to make education available  twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, that people could literally  have a whole different attitude toward learning.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf history is again repeating itself, the schools are in serious  trouble. In a 1986 book, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of  Technology Since 1920, Larry Cuban, a professor of education at Stanford  University and a former school superintendent, observed a pattern in how  schools handled each round of technology that mirrored and elaborated  Harry Wise’s tale. The cycle always began with big promises, backed by  the technology developers’ research. In the classroom, teachers never  really embraced the new tools, and no significant academic improvement  occurred. This provoked consistent responses from technology promoters:  The problem was money, or teacher resistance, or the paralyzing school  bureaucracy. Meanwhile, few people questioned the technology advocates’  claims. As results continued to lag, the blame was finally laid on the  machines. Soon schools were sold on the next generation of technology,  and the lucrative cycle started all over again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eToday’s technology evangels commonly argue that we’ve learned our lesson  from past mistakes. As in each previous round, they say that when  today’s technology (the computer) is compared with yesterday’s machine,  today’s is better. “It can do the same things, plus,” Richard Riley, the  former secretary of education, told The Atlantic Monthly in 1997. In a  2002 interview, John Bailey, the director of educational technology  under President George W. Bush, bolstered Riley’s view. There is a great  opportunity with computers, he argued, that is not yet realized but  seems entirely possible: to “personalize and individualize”  instruction—pinpointing certain students’ weaknesses, for example, or  customizing homework assignments—in ways that their mass-media  predecessors couldn’t.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eConsidering the obvious power of today’s personal computers, Riley and  Bailey might appear to be right. However, since schools have been badly  burned by so many of technology’s unfulfilled promises, it’s worth  pausing a moment to ask an obvious question: What does the record on  school computing so far really show? Apparently, hindsight has  airbrushed its history quite heavily.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA NEW DAWN, TAKE ONE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn January 1975, a new machine appeared on the cover of Popular  Mechanics. It was a funny-looking device—a square box with flip switches  on its front plate, connected to a Teletype machine. The machine was  called the Altair 8800 personal computer kit and manufactured by H.  Edward Roberts, the president of a small outfit in Albuquerque, New  Mexico, called Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems, or MITS. The  Altair offered 256 bytes of memory, an immeasurable speck by today’s  standards, and sold for $397. MITS was promptly bombarded with thousands  of orders, and the personal computer was born. One of the people  captivated by the Popular Mechanics story was a young Harvard student  named Bill Gates, who subsequently ditched Harvard and traveled to  Albuquerque in search of a job. Before long, the Altair was shipping  with an old mainframe programming language specially adapted for this  machine by Gates and his future partner, Paul Allen. Soon, Microsoft too  was born, along with a whole new industry, called software. Two years  later, in 1977, a handful of machines, called microcomputers, most of  which looked like today’s large microwave ovens, were shown off at the  inaugural West Coast Computer Faire. One of these was a long, slim,  sloping package called the Apple II. The world was suddenly treated to  an assortment of computers being manufactured in a form that was  relatively small and inexpensive (the first Apple IIs, equipped with a  mere 4K of memory, sold for $1,298, a sharp drop from the $18,000 to  $20,000 for which a mini-computer had been sellin). It was only natural  now to start promoting these nimble machines in the nation’s classrooms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePerhaps it’s a reflection of the personal computer’s increasingly  compressed intensity; perhaps it’s simply fate. Whatever the case, this  machine’s history in schools repeats, in quickened and more dynamic  form, technology’s entire education story. As the years have rolled on,  the aspirations attached to each version and function of the computer  have washed over the schools in noisy successions of swells and crashes.  Indeed, the somewhat quieter discussion we see at the turn of the new  century about classroom technology (and computer technology in general)  is a predictable ebb, sliding back from the high computer frenzy of the  late 1990s. The pattern is not terribly different, in fact, from the  nation’s first big flood of computopia, which hit in the early 1980s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e From the personal computer’s debut in 1975 through most of 1981, its  manufacturers (and their enthusiasts in the schools) primarily busied  themselves with getting their houses in order. Commercial breakthroughs  and innovative programs steadily popped up, and schools began the slow  process of buying and installing these new machines—in computer labs, in  school libraries, and, occasionally, in a few classrooms. Not  surprisingly, some of the first innovative classroom uses of the PC  arose in its Silicon Valley seedbed. Some of those early visions were  quite ambitious, aiming for the same pedagogical goals that  twenty-first-century technology leaders would be striving toward two  decades later.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn example was the Crittenden Middle School in Mountain View, on the  northern edge of the valley. In 1981, Crittenden was already using PCs  to make simple graphs, execute geometry exercises, and navigate  problem-solving activities. As one teacher, Steve King, put it, the  computer let students simulate science experiments “that otherwise would  be too expensive or difficult to perform.” King also said he was taken  with the computer’s apparent ability to adapt to each student’s  individual pace—the same gold mine that John Bailey, George W. Bush’s  technology chief, would still be dreaming about in 2002. Crittenden  never found that pot of gold, for reasons that the John Baileys of the  world might do well to remember. In fact, despite Crittenden’s herculean  efforts, computer technology continually failed to take hold at the  school in general. Steve King, the technology enthusiast, is of course  long gone by now. But Sue Nelson, a longtime language arts teacher at  Crittenden, remembers those days quite clearly. “We never got any  support,” Nelson said. “Anyone who is any good with computers is out  working in industry making big bucks.” Nelson, who had been at  Crittenden since the early 1980s, recalled numerous attempts to scale up  the school’s computer program that were continually foiled by system  crashes, which have continued to this day. “The teachers then spend a  day and a half rebuilding everything. The computers have been absolutely  frustrating. We’ve got all this potential with three labs on campus, but  that’s all it is—a lot of potential.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile plenty of technology obviously did take hold elsewhere in Silicon  Valley, it was years before California launched any organized campaign  for computers in schools. It wasn’t even the first state to do so;  Minnesota had seen the digital writing on the wall almost a decade  earlier. In 1973, it formed the Minnesota Educational Computing  Consortium (MECC), an ambitious and, in time, a nationally influential  cooperative of state agencies and Minnesota colleges and universities.  As an early sign of the coming academic attitude, Don Rawitsch, MECC’s  manager of user services, told a reporter in late 1981, “We’ve got to  get computers away from the image of being separate from everything else.”Winner of the National Magazine Award; [quote]--The Christian Science Monitor","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304897663205,"sku":"NP9780812968439","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812968439.jpg?v=1767739370","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-flickering-mind-isbn-9780812968439","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}