Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--For Better and Worse

Jane M. Healy

Simon and Schuster, Jul 13, 1999 - Education - 352 pages

In this comprehensive, practical, and unsettling look at computers in children's lives, Jane M. Healy, Ph.D., questions whether computers are really helping or harming children's development. Once a bedazzled enthusiast of educational computing but now a troubled skeptic, Dr. Healy examines the advantages and drawbacks of computer use for kids at home and school, exploring its effects on children's health, creativity, brain development, and social and emotional growth.
Today, the Federal Government allocates scarce educational funding to wire every classroom to the Internet, software companies churn out "educational" computer programs even for preschoolers, and school administrators cut funding and space for books, the arts, and physical education to make room for new computer hardware. It is past the time to address these issues. Many parents and even some educators have been sold on the idea that computer literacy is as important as reading and math. Those who haven't hopped on the techno bandwagon are left wondering whether they are shortchanging their children's education or their students' futures. Few people stop to consider that computers, used incorrectly, may do far more harm than good.
New technologies can be valuable educational tools when used in age-appropriate ways by properly trained teachers. But too often schools budget insufficiently for teacher training and technical support. Likewise, studies suggest that few parents know how to properly assist children's computer learning; much computer time at home may be wasted time, drawing children away from other developmentally important activities such as reading, hobbies, or creative play. Moreover, Dr. Healy finds that much so-called learning software is more "edutainment" than educational, teaching students more about impulsively pointing and clicking for some trivial goal than about how to think, to communicate, to imagine, or to solve problems. Some software, used without careful supervision, may also have the potential to interrupt a child's internal motivation to learn.
Failure to Connect is the first book to link children's technology use to important new findings about stages of child development and brain maturation, which are clearly explained throughout. It illustrates, through dozens of concrete examples and guidelines, how computers can be used successfully with children of different age groups as supplements to classroom curricula, as research tools, or in family projects. Dr. Healy issues strong warnings, however, against too early computer use, recommending little or no exposure before age seven, when the brain is primed to take on more abstract challenges. She also lists resources for reliable reviews of child-oriented software, suggests questions parents should ask when their children are using computers in school, and discusses when and how to manage computer use at home. Finally, she offers a thoughtful look at the question of which skills today's children will really need for success in a technological future -- and how they may best acquire them.
Based on years of research into learning and hundreds of hours of interviews and observations with school administrators, teachers, parents, and students, Failure to Connect is a timely and eye-opening examination of the central questions we must confront as technology increasingly influences the way we educate our children.

Popular passages

Page 197 - The new practice of entering virtual worlds raises fundamental questions about our communities and ourselves. My account challenges any simple utilitarian story. For every step forward in the instrumental use of a technology (what the technology can do for us), there are subjective effects. The technology changes us as people, changes our relationships and sense of ourselves. My account also calls into question...‎

Page 296 - For the first time,' he argues, 'children can reach past the suffocating boundaries of social convention, past their elders' rigid notions of what is good for them‎

Page 269 - ... consideration of education, computational models and the human psyche'. 109 It constitutes undoubtedly the most coherent and successful version of the cognitivist position with its assimilation of human psychic processes to that of the computer. Papert envisages children as miniature programmers, arguing that ‘in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an exploration about how they themselves think'.‎

Page 312 - Cog's mobile torso, neck, and head stand on a pedestal. Trained to track the largest moving object in its field (because this will usually be a human being) Cog "noticed" me soon after I entered its room. Its head turned to follow me and I was embarrassed to note that this made me happy. I found myself competing with another visitor for its attention. At one point, I felt sure that Cog's eyes had "caught‎

Page 28 - Stated in the most dramatic terms, the accusation can be made that the uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of our humanity. It creates a culture without moral foundation. It undermines certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.‎

Page 29 - There have never been so many opportunities to do things that were impossible before. It's the best time ever to start new companies, advance sciences such as medicine that improve the quality of life.‎

Page 150 - We may discover, too, that language is a hardier thing than I have allowed. It may flourish among the beep and the click and the monitor as readily as it ever did on the printed page. I hope so, for language is the soul's ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.‎

Page 150 - Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994, p. 121), allows 50 years for the "historical moment‎

Page 37 - Proponents of this school of thought make the rather startling claim that 'the potential of computers for improving education is greater than that of any prior invention, including books and writing" (Walker, 1984: 3). Others take quite a different stance, emphasizing the inherent conservativism of the teaching profession with regard to pedagogical change and the failure of other highly touted educational innovations to bring about far-reaching changes. Thus it seemed important to me to design...‎

Page 312 - Cog was able to accomplish but by my own reaction to "him." For years, whenever I had heard Rodney Brooks speak about his robotic "creatures," I had always been careful to mentally put quotation marks around the word. But now, with Cog, I had found that the quotation marks disappeared. Despite myself and despite my continuing skepticism about this research project, I had behaved as though in the presence of another being.‎

About the author

Jane M. Healy, Ph.D. is a teacher and educational psychologist who has worked with young people of all ages, from pre-school to graduate school. She has been a classroom teacher, reading and learning specialist, school administrator, and clinician. She is currently a lecturer and consultant, and the author of three books about how children do (and don’t) learn, Your Child’s Growing Mind, Endangered Minds, and Failure to Connect. She and her work have been featured in national media such as CNN and NPR. She has twice been named “Educator of the Year” by Delta Kappa Gamma, the professional honor society of women educators. Jane and her husband claim they have learned most of what they know from raising three sons and enjoying six grandchildren.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds--For Better and Worse
• Author: Jane M. Healy
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 1999
• ISBN: 0684865203, 9780684865201
• Length: 352 pages
• Subjects: Education / General; Family & Relationships / Parenting / General; Psychology / Developmental / Child