Teaching tech much too soon?

In the past week, Bellevue's Wynn Cannon has been called retrograde, a Luddite, an anachronism in our hyper-digital society.

It's true — the silver-haired, anti-tax crusader may be all of those things. He may also be right.

Cannon, 78, threw out an impolitic bomb this week when he said that using computers in school is overrated, especially in the lower grades. It's not only exceedingly expensive but may hamper learning the three R's, he said.

Bellevue should just get rid of the machines until about high school, Cannon grumped to The Seattle Times' Rachel Tuinstra, explaining one reason his group — the League of Washington Taxpayers — is against a $51 million tech levy for Bellevue schools.

Reaction from the digital tribe was swift and fierce.

"I am appalled that a group from Bellevue — the seat of Seattle's answer to Silicon Valley — would actually advocate the removal of computers from the school district," said one of many letters to this newspaper.

Now, I don't agree with Cannon's anti-tax arguments. And I don't have a position on this particular school levy.

But as the father of a kid who is led off to computer class as a regular part of her kindergarten curriculum — she's 5 — I gotta say the Luddite has a point. Our infatuation with high tech is out of control.

Buying high technology cost U.S. schools $100 billion in the past decade. There isn't much evidence it did any good, says Todd Oppenheimer, author of "The Flickering Mind: Saving Education From the False Promise of Technology."

"The argument is that, as we figure out how to use computers better in school, there will be real gains in learning," he said. "It hasn't shown up yet."

A recent major study found computers may even get in the way. Researchers at the University of Munich looked at reading and math scores for 175,000 students in 31 countries, and concluded that home use of computers correlated with lower scores, while school use made little difference.

Oppenheimer says a growing group of educators agrees in principle with Cannon — that computers are at best irrelevant in the early grades, when kids are first learning "to talk, to write, be creative, take notes, reason, reflect, slow down and figure out how things work."

Conversely, tech education ought to be more rigorous from junior high on, with kids learning not just how to use computers but how they work and how to program them.

My 5-year-old's computer training features one of those painting programs. It's fine — she can paint color swatches on the screen with a mouse. But I bet if my daughter, her teacher and her parents were all asked to rank, say, the 30 most beneficial things she could be doing at school, this would not make anyone's list.

But we do it anyway. We do it partly because we're afraid not to. And in our fear we scoff at the Luddites, even if they're only reminding us that what really matters in the classroom are the humans.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.