And the first will be last...

A NYT article says school districts in the US are scooping tens of thousands of iPads. They want to give those to to students, sometimes starting with kindergarten. What does this bold move demonstrate? Here is a suggestion: educators can now use only one last trick to attract and keep the attention of most students - put a screen under their nose. Poor communities which lack the resources to equip every child with a computer should in fact count this as a blessing. Unless the good Samaritans from One Laptop per Child Come Along. Judging from our daughter's experience, if Bulgarian education has one saving grace, it's the continuing reliance on hard copy and handwriting. There is research which suggests that printed matter evokes a stronger emotional reaction, and handwriting activates the brain in more beneficial way - as compared to reading from a screen and typing respectively. Oh, and some exciting statistics from the current issue of the Atlantic: the amount of time 15-to-19-year old in the US spent reading on a weekend day went down from 16 to 5 minutes in two years (between 2007 and 2009).