Whatever else can be said about it, the Internet is certainly a godsend
to politicians looking for new ways to spend the public’s money. It
offers everything: a seductively mystifying technology, the vague
promise of unlimited “educational” benefits, and the potential for
creating dozens of new regulations, permits, certification
requirements, and training programs—along with, of course, a vast new
government bureaucracy to oversee it all.

A recent Associated Press story brought this home to us. Reporting
on President Clinton’s promise to link “every American classroom and
library to the computer Internet” by the year 2000, the story noted
that the Department of Education had released the first $200
million—note the ominous word “first”—in grants for computer equipment and
training. In his weekly radio address, the story continued,
President Clinton lamented the fact that only a fifth of public
school teachers were using advanced telecommunications for teaching
and only 13 percent of public schools required that teachers
be trained in using the Internet. The story also noted that the
President’s 1998 budget—which includes $51 billion for
“education”—had earmarked $500 million for “technology literacy.”

In fact, the two most overrated words in the educational
establishment just now are “computer” and “Internet.” To
be sure, computers are wonderful tools, and the
Internet provides easy access to untold amounts of information. But, as always, it is important to
distinguish between an excellent means of communication and
excellent communications. Computers offer the former; only educated
men and women can manage the latter.

The cult of fostering “computer
literacy” is little more than the latest bureaucratic
boondoggle—an entrance not only onto the information superhighway
but also onto the bureaucratic superhighway. Its chief effect will
be to relieve the public of as much money as possible by invoking the irresistible talisman of
“education.” Never mind that the educational benefits of “computer
literacy” programs are dubious at best: the word “education” acts
like a magic charm on many people, causing them to lie
down, dissolve into a trance, and open their wallets.

As anyone who actually uses computers and the Internet knows, the
whole mystique of “computer literacy” is nine-tenths techno-babble.
It bears roughly the same relation to ordinary literacy as “free
love” does to the genuine article. It is important to recognize
that what really is meant by “computer literacy” is nothing more than
learning to use a few popular word-processing and number-crunching
programs —programs whose designers have spent millions upon millions
of dollars making them easy for laymen to use. Being “computer
literate” does not mean understanding how computers really work or
learning how to write high-level code. It simply means being able to
manipulate the latest in home appliances. As the phrase is generally
used, being “computer literate” requires less physical coordination
than learning to ride a bicycle and only slightly more conceptual
dexterity than learning to program a video tape player.

We wonder how long it will be before the public
cottons onto to this educational scam. One Senator, commenting critically on President
Clinton’s proposed educational programs, noted that there were
already 760 Federal education programs in place, 32 of which were
devoted to literacy. To hear some politicians wail on about
education, you would never know that the United States already
spends far more per pupil than any other country on earth. But with
what results? Every other day, it seems, we get a new report about
American students’ poor performance in mathematics, their inability
to read, their appalling ignorance of major historical facts.
But, as the example of parochial schools has shown again
and again, the problem is not money. Real improvement
in education requires not lavish spending and technological gimmicks, but committed teachers willing
to spend time insisting that students learn the basics: how to read,
write, and calculate effectively. Parochial schools spend only a
tiny fraction per pupil of what public schools do; but their
students consistently emerge both better educated and better behaved
because they battened not on the latest educational and sociological
fads but on materials and ideas that have stood the test of time.

What is needed is not a crash program in “computer
literacy” or linking schools and libraries to the Internet but
a return to the fundamentals of good education. These are to be had
not by sitting in front of a video display terminal but from the pages
of history, literature, and science—what used to be called a
liberal education. An educated person may well know how to use a
computer effectively; but, aiming to be literate, he would disdain
“computer literacy” as the chimera that it is.