E-Rate

This is an interesting article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/28/technology/28net.html

This is an article on how a big, well connected electronics company managed to rip off schools using the Federal E-Rate program to get schools on the Internet. As someone who actually advocates the use of the Internet in schools I'm hardly against E-Rate, which was one of the great things that President Clinton and Al Gore did for education, but one must have a healthy regard for the problems with technology in education. Larry Cuban of Stamford has made something of a career of pointing out the obvious and not so obvious problems with using technology in schools, but here we have just plain old corruption. Still, let's look at the big issues here. One, that technology is oversold as a "solution" for the perceived problems of schools in America when the fact is they are nothing of the sort because they don't address the conditions or assumptions of education. Two, that even if they weren't oversold they engender something of a technological priesthood at the expense of teachers. It creates another level of authority. Karl Popper, the great philosopher of democracy, would remind us that the world has many experts, but no authorities. Computers can create in schools an anti-democratic force that subverts the true work of the school. It can also, as we see here, create quite nice opportunities for corruption as well.