A WHAT for every student?!

Kevin Drum reports that his local middle school is supplying all students with PDAs. They're using mini-keyboards to type in their crappy essays and "beam" them to the teacher, who is just agog at how easy everything is. And I'm sure the teacher is paying close attention to spelling, and not merely running each student's work through the spellchecker. You know, so she can catch things like "too" when the kid means "to". Right. I'm enormously sympathetic to teachers and the work they have to do and the basic lack of respect they get for doing it, but all the same I'm not sure that we should really do things like this on the basis that it makes their lives easier.

Look. I'm a firm believer that we should be spending tons of money on our schools, that there should be one teacher for every ten kids, and that a teacher should make a lot of money. (I also wouldn't mind seeing the teachers' unions put up so many roadblocks to getting rid of bad teachers, but that's another issue.) But this "Give the latest tech toy to every kid" thing just drives me crazy, and not just because it pisses me off that kids are being given laptops when I might be able to afford a laptop sometime in 2006, if I play my cards right and sell a novel or two. Mainly it's because I envision all the little tykes with their spiffy iMacs or Vaios or whatevers, and then I immediately envision the way my seventh-grade math textbook, which had been brand new when given to me, looked when I handed it back in nine months later. And I was far from the worst student when it came to keeping my books from being dropped on the floor out of clumsiness or deposited there by virtue of my running into my school's version of Nelson Muntz.

Kevin also points out the tech support problems: are schools that give out freebie tech toys going to employ a full-time tech dude to change batteries and fix broken screens and repair keyboards and whatnot?

And finally, how many art and music programs could be funded for the cost of a PalmPilot for every pupil?