How computers entered the classroom, 1960–2000
degruyter.com
degruyter.com
By the time I was a sophomore, I had a CAD class that was always threatened to not be usable because jokesters thought it funny to remove the ball from the mice making the computers unusable. Eventually, my senior year, we had our first state level computer programming competition in PASCAL. Based on the school's performance my junior/senior year, a generous donation was made to the school so that the year after graduation, the school was gifted a very nice computer lab that made my freshman college class look antiquated (it pretty much was. printing code to greenbar FTW!!) It just so happened my younger sibling was a freshman that year and rubbed it in my face
When I first started school there only the library had 2 computers that were tied into the university networks and purely had access to some informational database systems that the librarians used. You could ask questions and they would look them up when they next had time, then print the results on dot matrix printers and give it to you the next day or so.
A bit later we got our first “computer lab” which was a room with 4 PCs and a massive dot matrix printer on a rolling stand that you could roll over to your desk and print to. It was generally just learning to type and print documents and do BASIC.
My main memory of it all was how convinced the teachers were that this was going to change the world forever. There was zero doubt or fear of negative consequences from computers, just pure wonder and excitement from all of them. They’d let us use them any time we wanted, in lunch breaks etc, because “anyone who doesn’t learn this stuff will be left behind”.
I started high school in Romania in 1992 and in the beginning we only had two PCs, one AT with VGA color monitor and one XT with monochrome Hercules, and the rest were Romanian made CP/M machines with 8 inch floppies and horrible keyboards that would either fail to get the input or get stuck. PC keyboard was like walking on the Moon compared to early keyboards.
We had Junior: https://retroit.ro/product/junior/
And CUB-Z: https://retroit.ro/product/cub-z/
After about a year the CP/M machines were decommissioned and 386 PCs brought in as replacements.
We did have one at home, since as back as I can remember, but it was uncommon to have one. Towards the end of the 90s it had become somewhat common.
Didn't get to see any kind of PC until 82 or so, my boss had a "Trash 80" which he used to access APL workspaces from home.
We had the occasional teacher who was enthusiastic, for example I had an English teacher who arranged for us to be email pen-pals with students from a school in Japan but for the most part the majority of teachers were utterly clueless about technology.
One vivid memory I have is from grade 10. I elected to do a tech drawing class, we were supposed to have some lessons on using CAD and the school had presumably paid money for CAD software in the computer lab but the instructor (maybe 50 years old) had no clue how to use the software. So after maybe 2 lessons of him fumbling around and no one accomplishing anything it was back to drawing in pencil with a compass and a protractor for the rest of the semester.
I first used a computer when I was a toddler in the 1980s, and I have been using them ever since. I went to a very low-income public school in a poverty-stricken, high-crime neighborhood, and we were using computers (albeit very outdated Apple II's that had been donated) starting in 1st grade. We were writing stories and printing them out by second grade, and learning how to "surf the web" and cite websites by 3rd. By high school, we were learning Photoshop and video editing.
Meanwhile, my partner attended a very expensive private school, yet his first experience with a computer came drastically later (like some time around 2000 or so?), and it was because his family bought one, not because the school had them.
On the other hand, he was already playing video games on a SNES from an early age, whereas I didn't get my first console (a cheap secondhand GameCube) until 2005 or 2006 when I was a university student.
I can really see the difference in our parents, too. His mother is essentially computer illiterate to this day, whereas even my grandpa (born in 1930 and grew up sharecropping) was making websites without any help from his children or grandchildren while I was still a little kid.
IMO there should be no technology in school classrooms until high school. Kids do not need computers to learn K-8 subject matter.
The problem is abuse of the tool, as you describe. In my primary school, we were taught how to use Microsoft Office by using a workbook the computer teacher licensed to the school. We had some of the best computer resources amongst local schools at the time, yet learnt almost nothing about computers. It took me until university to write a line of code.
I understand your sentiment about the opportunity costs for those with computing knowledge, but it wouldn’t be too hard to require teachers to do a basic computing unit at university. In the same way the best mathematicians are not usually school teachers, yet “regular” teachers seem to perform sufficiently.
But in general, why should we expect much improvement? School is mostly still a bunch of kids sitting around an adult, needing to concentrate. Having a computer means you don't have to lug around as many books, but it doesn't free you from having to read the books and do the exercises.
I'm not sure anyone was expecting a large gain from having the computers in the school to begin with, it's one of these things that happens because it gets cheaper as tech gets cheaper.
They sure did. I remember one huge levy for "Technology in the Classroom". All kinds of magical improvements in learning was the sales pitch.
There was no improvement at all, and all the promises were forgotten.
Pretty different from nowadays when new technology is met with fear, skepticism, cynicism, nihilism, and paranoia.
All that Aforementioned enthusiasm and illusion were implemented into the educational systems without first assessing its scientific foundation.
It’s like if surgeons started using plastic knives just because stainless steel looks dated, for example.
These grumpy outdated Cassandras, who question the validity of change for the sake of change must be ignored in their laments because computer devices are very expensive and have a short lifespan, making them perfect for draining public resources
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Today we understand they'd be built shoddily and rushed to market for the sake of short term profit, require mandatory subscription fees for basic features, spy on us, and come with falsely advertised self driving features.
We didn't become skeptical of technology spontaneously.
Could that be because initially they were products, and now we are the product?
Terrible computer, with great hardware. It was the beginning of ARM computing.
They worked together with him to write a curriculum they used with the entire teaching staff in our school to learn the systems before the new Windows computers came in to replace the old acorns or BBC micros or whatever, including several "inset" (?) days.
The big problem with all the teaching things at the time was being called "Windows for Dummies" or "Microsoft Office for dummies" or whatever - was that the teachers were really smart people - not dummies at all. So the "you don't understand the computer, therefore you are a dummy" was extremely degrading and put up walls instantly.
How people respond when you teach people as "smart, interested and motivated, but currently still extremely unfamiliar and somewhat apprehensive" compared to "not especially clever, and it's a very complicated thing so don't expect to really understand it" is very different.