If history has taught us anything, it’s that trying to hold off the future does not work. The Industrial Revolution was frightening, but countries that resisted (or lacked the wherewithal to join) were left behind. The rest of us grew richer (if unevenly). The same is true of the Computer Age, with all its challenges. Avoid it at your own peril. People argue against technology until the technology gets so good that the argument is silenced. Better to try to “reform from within” than smash the machines. From a new Economist article about the teaching of mathematics:

“Maths education has been a battlefield before: the American ‘math wars’ of the 1980s pitted traditionalists, who emphasised fluency in pen-and-paper calculations, against reformers led by the country’s biggest teaching lobby, who put real-world problem-solving, often with the help of calculators, at the centre of the curriculum. A backlash followed as parents and academics worried that the ‘new math’ left pupils ill-prepared for university courses in mathematics and the sciences. But as many countries have since found, training pupils to ace exams is not the same as equipping them to use their hard-won knowledge in work and life.

Today’s reformers think new technology renders this old argument redundant. They include Conrad Wolfram, who worked on Mathematica, a program which allows users to solve equations, visualise mathematical functions and much more. He argues that computers make rote procedures, such as long division, obsolete. ‘If it is high-level problem-solving and critical thinking we’re after, there’s not much in evidence in a lot of curriculums,’ he says.”