The El Paso Times reports that this year every EPISD high school student will be issued a laptop.
Are you kidding me? Do you think that every high school student needs a laptop? I know that some (maybe a lot) of the textbooks are digital, but couldn’t we just give the students a Kindle?
I’m sure that some kids could benefit scholastically from laptops, but every kid? We’re just exposing them to the time-sink that is Facebook.
Did you know that some people don’t even have an internet presence? Really. And I’m not just talking about federal agents and confidential informants. Some people just haven’t migrated over to cyberspace.
And there are plenty of good jobs where computer skills aren’t necessary, and a lot of El Paso’s high school kids are destined for those jobs.
I suspect that the reason EPISD decided to give all those kids laptops was because they had money left over and they needed to spend it.
Satire, right?
When I was a kid back in Chicago we used to take the train from Kensington station on the south side to the downtown Chicago public library. It was an adventure. We spent the day there. No laptops necessary.
I thought you would be interested in this story I found on MSN: The 20 Least Educated Cities in the U.S. http://a.msn.com/00/en-us/BBv9o1v?ocid=se
It seems El Paso could only muster a ranking of #12 as one of the least educated cities in the nation. Laptops? Perhaps we should make sure our students can read, write, and do some math first. Otherwise, we are only fostering developmental problems as kids “veg” on social media and become distracted from what their real purpose is in going to school.