For decades, a techno-utopian vision of the classroom has fired the dreams of educators. In this scenario, the teacher goes from being a "sage on the stage to a guide on the side." For in a classroom of self-directed, Web-linked students, the teacher's role is to simply offer subtle direction. In nations as diverse as China, India and Colombia, educators fuel this ambition with huge commitments to information technology. In other countries, like the United States, these investments defy budget cuts and teacher layoffs.
But like many Utopian visions, this one has run headlong into a backlash.
"Teaching is a human experience," Paul Thomas, an associate professor of education at Furman University in South Carolina, told The Times. "Technology is a distraction when we need literacy, numeracy and critical thinking."
Even Steven Jobs, who spearheaded the classroom computer revolution as a co-founder of Apple, had his doubts. Walter Isaacson, his biographer, described a conversation earlier this year between Mr. Jobs and Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft. The two men "agreed that computers had, so far, made surprisingly little impact on schools."
And Mr. Jobs was not the only Silicon Valley tech guru to question computers in the classroom. The Waldorf School of the Peninsula, located in the heart of Silicon Valley in Los Gatos, teaches the children of many employees from tech giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard, The Times reported. But computers cannot be found in the school, and their use is even discouraged at home.
Alan Eagle, who works at Google, does not fear that his children will fall behind. "At Google and all these places we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible," he told The Times. "There's no reason why kids can't figure it out when they get older."
Just don't say that in South Korea, which is spending $2 billion to further upgrade its already futuristic digital education model by 2015. And who can argue with success? Its students rank at the highest levels of math and science globally. But there is a toll on high achievers. Children are exhausted and stressed from late-night cramming sessions, and even the high-tech classrooms don't keep them from falling asleep during lessons. There is also a growing fear among Korean educators that their emphasis on rote learning, in this case underpinned by computers, is turning out students who don't think creatively.
Another hyper-wired nation, Finland, also ranks at the top in global-test scores. But the schools feature very little technology, and children there are not nearly as pressured.
Bryan Luizzi, principal of Brookfield High School in Connecticut, visited Finland this year. "It was a bit disarming," he told the Web site Scholastic.com. "I didn't see a single student with a laptop."
Of course, there are myriad factors that contribute to a nation's success in education. Finland has almost no poverty and teachers are well paid and highly respected.
As Rudy Crew, a former New York City schools chancellor, wrote in The Times, "Certainly, there are opportunities that can be captured through technology, yet at the heart of education is the teacher-student relationship."