A reporter of my town newspaper recently asked people on Main Street whether "laptop computers should be mandatory in high school," a clever and inventive question. Predictably, the response was overwhelmingly positive, but under the condition that students not pay for the machines. Schools or businesses had to provide them, of course. Asked about laptop use, a junior averred that "they are great for learning lessons," but she did not say why or how.

The topic of computers in the classroom has been debated for about fifteen years. Very early, the education establishment and computer manufacturers claimed that "computer literacy" was an unquestionable topic to be included in school curricula. The future of the country depended on it, they said. Computers were the indispensable tools that would finally turn students into scientists, and teachers into savants able to tell the difference between "principle" and "principal"---and which one runs the school.

So, educators and captains of industry set out to build a good case for asking local communities to spend more tax money on the new machinery. Teachers liked the idea because computers offered a great opportunity to play with a new toy, which is more fun than teaching. Computer manufacturers liked it too for their own reasons. All over the country, task forces and investigative committees went to work on a definition of "computer literacy." Not much came out of these efforts, save for startling revelations of their futility. A panel assembled by the school board of a big city invited a prominent computer scientist and mathematician to present his own definition. When the expert insisted that "computer literacy is the knowledge of where a computer's ON/OFF switch is located," the panelists were disappointed. They had hoped for a detailed statement full of cryptic words that they could have re-used in their final report. As the computer manufacturers moved the ON/OFF switch from the back to the front of their machines, attempts at defining computer literacy waned. The coup de grace came when Windows-style operation with a little hand device finally caught the attention of computer makers: "clicking the mouse" did not require any special skill, and even illiterates could do that flawlessly.

Meanwhile, teachers had redefined themselves from "educators" to "education facilitators," because they had found teaching too demanding, what with fine points such as the difference between "principle" and "principal," percentages, and which war started with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. A new style of education was thus born, whereby students would do their "own things" with the help of the facilitators, and discover in the process the laws of physics, English grammar, perspective drawing, and advanced mathematics, all that painlessly and almost inadvertently. In this brilliant model, the teacher would not teach anymore, he would just take advantage of the students' interests to steer them into studying what they were supposed to study. In short, he would fool the kids.

Predictably, the new method was destined to failure because of its silly premise. The students' "own things" seldom matched the teachers' tastes and abilities, and teachers could not easily fool naturally subversive kids. Faced with the difficulties of their new mission, the "facilitators" thus decided that they would themselves push topics of study that they thought were fun, within their competence or lack thereof, easy on the students, and appealing to their charges' rebellious propensities. We know the result, a trendy, trivial mush wrapped in righteous political correctness and dressed up as original thinking. Some kids were not fooled, but they accepted the scheme because it was not demanding and allowed for easy good grades. Others liked to think that they were saving the planet and "society" by writing incoherent essays on the destruction of the environment by evil capitalists, or the immorality of keeping animals in zoos, or Thomas Jefferson's hypocrisy for being a white male and a slave owner. While such sanctimoniousness raised student self-esteem, national test scores obstinately insensitive to claims of good intentions kept plummeting. High-school kids can't write, can't reckon, are overall ignorant, and can't even think rationally in spite of wondrous teaching methods designed to develop their "critical-thinking skills."

The shoddiness of this arrangement obviously called for a cover to divert people's attention. "We must have computers in the schools," the facilitators asserted. They said that through the Internet, students would be able to communicate with Nobel-Prize scientists and find new ways to save the planet---that's why prominent scientists have two e-mail addresses, one pointing at their computer's trash can and another known only to their friends. It is easy to envisage the facilitators' new roles as Internet mentors. They would just have to provide the students with the addresses of the web sites essential to critical scientific research, such as "Save The Whales" and "Women In Science," then sit and watch the mouse clicking and make sure that Jimmy in the back of the room does not launch a WebCrawler search for "quaternions," or "Maxwell's equations," or "nekked wimin," or "explosives."

So, computers have appeared in the classroom, where students are now able to produce glossy reports with illustrations in many colors about George Washington's slaves, the destruction of the rain forest by capitalism, and the invention of the US constitution by the Iroquois. They also write essays printed in elegant fonts on their feelings about mathematics, science, and history. Unfortunately, word processors cannot correct the use of "principal" for "principle," or "it's" for "its," but nobody notices. Meanwhile, national test scores keep plummeting.

Many social critics have analyzed the education malaise. Depending on their political proclivities, they blame poor funding, low teacher salaries, class size, society, government, union power, but many exonerate the teachers and even praise them as heroic figures who try to do their best against impossible odds. Yet, we spend more than twice as much per pupil as western European countries that regularly trounce us on international science and math competitions. We also spend more than twice as much as we did in 1960 in dollars adjusted for inflation, and some of the best-funded public schools get the worst results. Teacher salaries have kept up very well with those of other categories, and the starting pay of a teacher in California matches that of an assistant college professor in the humanities with a doctoral degree. In study after study, class size, the average of which has considerably declined in the past forty years, has proved to be practically irrelevant. Other interesting studies have established that the level of knowledge acquired by high-school students is strongly correlated to what their teachers know, which in some instances turns out to be very little, according to a recent Massachusetts test. All this hints that the causes of educational malfunctions are poorly identified, and purposely so.

It is true that union power has been an important factor, because teacher unions have the largest membership of all and enormous resources. As unions derive their power from their memberships, it is clear that teachers have chosen not to use this power to keep education healthy. On the contrary, they have used it for the single purpose of transforming schools into job factories. In the pursuit of this goal, they have submitted to all sorts of political pressures aiming at dumbing down the curriculum to make graduation possible for the worst students. They have also embraced the monopoly of degraded schools of education, where trivial psychobabble and pursuits of social re-engineering have long supplanted substantial instruction, and where subpar students can be assured the required credentials. This pattern of single-minded self-protection has recently culminated in an occurrence of high-school teachers helping students to cheat on tests. As anecdotal as this incident may be, it is a sign of monstrous degeneration. Being of a generous disposition, I put the blame on about ninety percent of the teachers, allowing that ten percent of them try hard to teach well, deplore the deterioration of their occupation, but can do little about it. Unfortunately, it is this minority that politicians parade on television news to conceal the sickness of the system.

Restoring quality education will not be easy. The abolishment of the schools of education is likely the best way to start, along with requirements of degrees in core subjects---not in "education"---for aspiring teachers: a bachelor's degree for teaching in elementary schools, and a master's degree in the subject for middle schools and high schools. An additional semester---at the most---can accommodate pedagogic studies. Such changes will be forcefully opposed by the education establishment, and have little chance to prevail under current conditions, but intermediate measures can help a move in the right direction. One of them is the dismantlement of the public-school monopoly through education vouchers or similar devices. Another is the instauration of meaningful national standards of competence for public-school teachers, along with verification by objective testing. The free market will do the rest.

Laptops will do as much good to my town's high school as a Band-Aid to a peg leg, the junior's insipid endorsement notwithstanding. Just remember all the marvelous benefits that education was supposed to educe from the overhead projector, the copying machine, television, and the video player-recorder. I rest my case.