Take-home laptops — a valuable teaching tool or an unnecessary technology distraction? Jonathan Zimmerman, a New York University history professor, opts for the latter. In an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Zimmerman explains how, ever since his teenage daughter was given a laptop from the local school district, he’s seeing much less of her. Zimmerman argues that student-owned laptops give children “too much privacy” and encourage kids to retreat to digital lairs of their own making in their bedrooms. Fully 36 percent of America’s 8 to 18 year-olds have computers in their bedrooms, one study says. And 50 percent of the nation’s 2,500 largest school districts expect to have a one student/one laptop program by next year. But Zimmerman claims there’s scant evidence that having their own laptops actually improve students’ grades. The history professor notes that Americans have a long tradition of believing that the latest gee-whiz gadget will fix their schools. Thomas Edison, he says, was convinced that his motion-picture camera would do away with the need for textbooks. In the 1930s, radio was seen as the savior of education; in the ‘50s, it was television. The only real way to “save” American education, Zimmerman insists, is having more talented teachers, and that means increasing teachers’ salaries to attract more top college grads to the profession. Writes Zimmerman: “We need to think much more about investing in people, not machines.”

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