| Rules for Fools |
29 September 2003
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PDA Distract Educrats More than Students
The Personal Digital Assistant is a piece of technology that is to the 21st century what the Swiss Army Knife was to the 20th; it does it all just adequately. High schools in America have largely banned the device from classes because of the text messaging capacity which will allow for cheating during tests. Such bans are the Luddite approach to the problem.
The PDA will not go away, any more than the cell phone, the light bulb or the match. If history teaches anything, it is that genies never return to their bottles. And the problem is never with the technology itself. Objects are amoral. Only a human being can misuse a tool.
Passing notes in class and cheating on tests pre-date the PDA, and the device only makes these practices easier because of the ability of the device to communicate wirelessly. Jamming these signals inside a class room is the obvious solution, or setting up a monitor of the broadcasts in the school. Under American law, broadcast signals are not protected from eavesdropping. The greatest deterrent to note-passing is the fear that it will be read in front of the class. An automatic monitor guarantees interception, and so the problem goes away.
School administrators have better things to do that worry about such trifles; getting history texts into class that don't end with the Ford administration would be a better issue to resolve. As the president himself asked, "Is our children learning? [sic, sic, sic]" Add in school uniforms, teaching to standardized tests and the folly of "intelligent design" in biology, and the answer most certainly is "Nope, our children isn't."
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