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开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780812968439
Oppenheimer, is a landmark account of the failure of technology to
improve our schools and a call for renewed emphasis on what really
works.
American education faces an unusual moment of crisis. For decades,
our schools have been beaten down by a series of curriculum fads,
empty crusades for reform, and stingy funding. Now education and
political leaders have offered their biggest and most expensive
promise ever—the miracle of computers and the Internet—at a cost of
approximately $70 billion just during the decade of the 1990s.
Computer technology has become so prevalent that it is transforming
nearly every corner of the academic world, from our efforts to
close the gap between rich and poor, to our hopes for school
reform, to our basic methods of developing the human imagination.
Technology is also recasting the relationships that schools strike
with the business community, changing public beliefs about the
demands of tomorrow’s working world, and reframing the nation’s
systems for researching, testing, and evaluating achievement.
All this change has led to a culture of the flickering mind, and a
generation teetering between two possible futures. In one,
youngsters have a chance to become confident masters of the tools
of their day, to better address the problems of tomorrow.
Alternatively, they can become victims of commercial novelties and
narrow measures of ability, underscored by misplaced faith in
standardized testing.
At this point, America’s students can’t even make a fair choice.
They are an increasingly distracted lot. Their ability to reason,
to listen, to feel empathy, is quite literally flickering.
Computers and their attendant technologies did not cause all these
problems, but they are quietly accelerating them. In this
authoritative and impassioned account of the state of education in
America, Todd Oppenheimer shows why it does not have to be this
way.
Oppenheimer visited dozens of schools nationwide—public and
private, urban and rural—to present the compelling tales that frame
this book. He consulted with experts, read volumes of studies, and
came to strong and persuasive conclusions: that the essentials of
learning have been gradually forgotten and that they matter much
more than the novelties of technology. He argues that every time we
computerize a science class or shut down a music program to pay for
new hardware, we lose sight of what our priority should be:
“enlightened basics.” Broad in scope and investigative in
treatment, The Flickering Mind will not only contribute to a vital
public conversation about what our schools can and should be—it
will define the debate.
From the Hardcover edition.
“This is the most important book of its kind since Jonathan
Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, and it carries the same torch—telling
us what’s really going on inside the public education system. The
Flickering Mind is a powerful work and a must-read for anyone who
cares what will be within the minds of the next generation of
Americans.”
—Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic, author of
The Progress Paradox
“Todd Oppenheimer brings two great strengths to the subject he
explores in The Flickering Mind: an understanding of technology’s
possibilities and limitations, and an appreciation for the
day-by-day realities of the way children learn. He also has a good
eye for what is working, and why, in the classroom—and for what is
hucksterish in the sales tactics used to promote high-tech
learning. The combination makes The Flickering Mind authoritative
and original, clear in its main message but also nuanced and
fair.”
—James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly,
author of Breaking the News
“Todd Oppenheimer addresses the implications of computers in the
classroom in a work of impressive scholarship and balanced
judgment. He reviews evidence of how political leaders and some
ambitious educators have ‘oversold’ the value of computers at the
cost of the human features of learning, the challenge and
excitement of teacher-student interaction, and the stimulation of
imagination. This is a provocative but potentially constructive
contribution to education for our time.”
—Jerome L. Singer, Ph.D., professor of psychology and child study
at Yale University, co-editor of Handbook of Children and the
Media
“A splendid book, humane and smart, with the authority that comes
only from lots of patient reporting. For those who care about
children, this is an important—and impressively sensible—guide to
what has gone wrong with schools and how we can put matters right,
if parents and educators can get free of inflated promises.”
—William Greider, National Book Award nominee, author of The Soul
of Capitalism
From the Hardcover edition.
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