Argument against high-tech toddlers

Computers: An educational psychologist denounces the trend toward a technology 'jump-start' for young children.

Mike Bowler | Education Beat

February 25, 2001

ACHILD'S MIND is a terrible thing to waste on computers.

Or so Jane Healy believes. Healy is an educational psychologist who believes it's not only useless but damaging to put computers in the hands of children younger than age 7 - at home or in school. And she says most of the software intended for kids just learning to read is unproven "junk" marketed by people "who have no idea how children learn."

Healy was in town Thursday, carrying her message to Jemicy, the school for dyslexic children in Owings Mills. More than 300 people had signed up to hear her evening lecture, wiped out by the storm. But Healy spent the afternoon talking with Jemicy pupils and faculty.

The interesting thing about Healy is that she's not a technology Luddite who would take up sledgehammer against all computers. "I love technology," says the veteran teacher, principal, college professor and reading specialist. "I was involved in thinking about and watching the development of children using computers long before it was widely accepted."

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But what she resists passionately is the current craze to "jump-start" toddlers and very young children on computers. "The human brain does not want to be jump-started," she says, "and the people who are making these products are telling parents that their kids are worthless if they're not jump-started. It's ridiculous."

Healy, whose latest of four books is "Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds - and What We Can Do About It," says she believes that computer instruction might help young children internalize the sounds of foreign languages and that technology might be useful in teaching those with specific disorders, such as cerebral palsy.

But with those exceptions, she argues, computer use by the very young "is potentially damaging because it's taking from children the things they should be doing at those ages." That includes having human contact, learning the rudiments of language and "just learning who you are. You learn these things through three-dimensional experiences, not one-dimensional experiences that are someone else's idea of what you should know.

"Besides, most software for children doesn't require them to listen to anything. They just sit and look."

That, of course, has been the chief complaint about television for a half-century. Computers and TV detract from a child's "ideation," says Healy. "Ideation is the ability to create a vision that's mentally tangible without anything else. Good readers are good ideators."

An art teacher recently told her, Healy says, that some of her students could not draw a horse without first being shown a picture of one. "Some kids are so immersed in visual media that they can't form images in their minds. It's sad."

With a storm howling outside, Healy spent an hour in the school gym with Jemicy's middle school pupils. The human brain may have 100 billion cells, known as neurons, she explained, "and the more stuff you think about, the more these little critters grow, and the smarter you get."

Healy broke the crowd into groups of four and five (including teachers), asked each to consider what the computer can do that the human brain can't, and vice versa, then asked them to reach a consensus on whether computers will ever be as smart as their human creators. Each small group was to report back to the larger group.

Some of the results were funny, some insightful:

"The computer can't do enjoyable things like going to the beach and playing football."

"The computer doesn't have the emotions and stuff, but if we could be hooked up to one and have the knowledge of the computer along with the emotions, that would be good." (Healy told the pupils that some very deep thinkers are thinking along those same lines.)

"Computers do not have instinct. It doesn't come naturally to them."

"Humans can be lonely."

"No, computers won't be as smart. People can think on our own. We have to tell computers what to do."

"We can imagine stuff, you know. I can imagine Nick in a spacesuit. Do you think a computer could do that?"

"It's possible computers could be smarter. If we don't use the brains we've got, computers could get smarter because we rely on them too much."

This last was music to Healy's ears. "Your brain grew today whether you wanted it to or not," she said.