Note: The following article was written in 1999 and is even more relevant today.
Educational toys have come a long way since the Tinker Toys of my childhood. There are computers in schools and homes. Computer games for 3-year-olds are available even in nursery schools.
In 1983, our family purchased an Apple II computer specifically to enhance our children’s education. We bought it for the word processor. A more useful tool hadn’t been invented since the Guttenberg press. We were the first and, for quite a while, the only family in our community to have a personal computer.
By 1999, seven out of ten families had PCs[1]. According to a survey children average five hours a day in front of TV, computers, and video games. Electronic devices provide much of the education for children in and out of school.
The educational programs in the early 80s were little more than workbooks programmed for the monitor. However, there was a game called Zork. It was created by some computer buffs from Yale who were Dungeon and Dragon fans. It was billed as a computer game for literate people.
Zork was composed mostly of words and a few pictures. The player would negotiate a maze by solving riddles. My 13-year-old son and his 11-year-old friend would play this game endlessly. They read and thought and schemed their way through the maze. Then they got stopped outside a locked door with a bag of items and an unsolved riddle. They consulted everyone they saw for days. Yet the riddle was unsolved. Then one of the boys looked through the keyhole and saw the key in the lock. He decided to push it out with one of the “tools” in the bag. The other boy thought of sliding a newspaper, which was also in the tool bag, under the door and EUREKA! They were ecstatic, literally jumping up and down. The ten-year-old raced to the phone to call his mom. There was rejoicing in two households. The boys continued to the next riddle/problem – filled with confidence. The boys had learned persistence, cooperation, logic, and even spelling in front of the computer. I was impressed.
Years earlier, I had been very unimpressed when my husband worked as a programmer on a project to get computers into the Chicago school system. A central computer bank was connected to terminals in all the schools. If it went down, everything went down. It appeared that the computers were down as much as they were up and working. Even when they were working, the educational programs were mostly fill-in-the-blank and except for the instant correction had no advantage over workbooks.
In fact, I was thoroughly disheartened. The millions of dollars paid for the hardware, software, and programmers were wasted. A few years later the whole project was scrubbed. As a classroom teacher I could visualize better uses for the money namely lower class sizes by hiring more teachers and teacher aids. Individualized attention is a proven method of improving learning rate.
FAILURE TO CONNECT: HOW COMPUTERS AFFECT OUR CHILDREN’S MINDS FOR BETTER OR WORSE authored by Jane M. Healy is a book critical of computers in the classroom. Jane M. Healy, educator, had been mainly responsible for getting computers utilized by schools in the 80s. A decade later she visited the schools and took a hard look at the results of her earlier efforts. She found that the computers were entertaining the students. The teachers complained that the worst thing these days is to be bored. The new generation cannot wait. “Edutainment” is a word coined to describe this phenomenon. The book is filled with documentation of the disappointment this educator felt with high tech in the classroom.
I particularly noted her description of Maze Games on the computer. These days, the player does not type in words but clicks the right answer. She found that children paid no attention to the logic of the game. They were becoming fast guessers. Gone was the thrill in solving a problem; replaced by a thrill of winning a race.
What is the cost of these computers really? Billions of dollars for sure. Then there is the loss of all the things they can’t learn from a computer – skills in sports, music, even literature.
I read an article (in 1999) about young moguls in the computer industry who were buying mansions. According to the interior designer who wrote the article, these homeowners often wanted oak paneled libraries; even though they neither owned nor read books.
Perhaps we need a legion of workers to sit in front of computers – entering and retrieving data. Perhaps “tech toys” designed for toddlers, going as young as nine months, have a purpose. They could be just setting up these children to be lifelong droids. Youngsters who lack important personal and social habits will be at the mercy of computers rather than in control of them.
Computers can be used to enhance skills and have a uniqueness that could improve learning. But if computers are substitutes for teachers, books, social interaction, and physical exercise they become a modern Trojan Horse and are deadly to this culture.
Postscript: A 2025 study of 292,000 children worldwide found that spending too much time on screens may cause emotional and behavioral problems in children—and those problems can lead to even more screen use, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
[1] Today, over 90% of U.S. teens (ages 13–17) have their own smartphone, with ownership rising sharply to 91% by age 14. Roughly 42% to 53% of children own a phone by age 10–11, and nearly 1 in 5 (19%) children have a smartphone by age 8. Approximately 88% to 93% of U.S. children and teenagers (ages 3–18) have access to a computer at home, according to 2021 data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and reports from New America.
