By NATE STULMAN
SWARTHMORE,
Pa. -- Conventional wisdom says that computers are a necessary tool for
higher
education. Many colleges and universities these days require students to
have personal computers,
and some factor the cost
of one into tuition. A number of colleges have put high-speed Internet
connections in every dorm
room. But there are good reasons to question the wisdom of this
preoccupation with computers
and the Internet.
Take a walk through the residence
halls of any college in the country and you'll find students seated at
their desks, eyes transfixed
on their computer monitors. What are they doing with their top-of-the-line
PC's and high-speed T-1
Internet connections?
They are playing Tomb Raider
instead of going to chemistry class, tweaking the configurations of their
machines instead of writing
the paper due tomorrow, collecting mostly useless information from the
World Wide Web instead of
doing a math problem set -- a host of other activity that has little or
nothing
to do with traditional academic
work.
I have friends who have spent
whole weekends doing nothing but playing Quake or Warcraft or other
interactive computer games.
One friend sometimes spends entire evenings -- six to eight hours --
scouring the Web for images
and modifying them just to have a new background on his computer
desktop.
And many others I know have
amassed overwhelming collections of music on their computers. It's the
searching and finding that
they seem to enjoy: some of them have more music files on their computers
than they could play in
months.
Several people who live in
my hall routinely stay awake all night chatting with dormmates on line.
Why
walk 10 feet down the hall
to have a conversation when you can chat on the computer -- even if it
takes
three times as long?
You might expect that personal
computers in dorm rooms would be used for nonacademic purposes, but
the problem is not confined
to residence halls. The other day I walked into the library's reference
department, and five or
six students were grouped around a computer -- not conducting research,
but
playing Tetris. Every time
I walk past the library's so-called research computers, it seems that at
least
half are being used to play
games, chat or surf the Internet aimlessly.
Colleges and universities
should be wary of placing such an emphasis on the use of computers and
the
Internet. The Web may be
useful for finding simple facts, but serious research still means a trip
to the
library.
For most students, having
a computer in the dorm is more of a distraction than a learning tool. Other
than
computer science or mathematics
majors, few students need more than a word processing program and
access to E-mail in their
rooms.
It is true, of course, that
students have always procrastinated and wasted time. But when students
spend
four, five, even ten hours
a day on computers and the Internet, a more troubling picture emerges --
a
picture all the more disturbing
because colleges themselves have helped create the problem.
Nate Stulman is a sophomore
at Swarthmore College.