8.1. Looking for the Benefits

In her disturbing book Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds—For Better and Worse, Healy offers numerous such stories based on her remarkably extensive observation of computer-based education around the country. The stories range from good to bad to ugly—with the great majority being decidedly ugly. It's enough to make any sober-minded reader despair of the American educational system.

Healy herself struggles mightily to see benefits, real or potential, in the classroom use of computers. Her typical positive scenario runs something like this: here's an example of a reasonably healthy exploitation of the computer in a richly textured classroom setting; but given the healthy setting, much the same thing could easily be achieved without the massive expenditures on high-tech equipment and support.