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Vol. 3: Contents

Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature

Gina M. Siesing and Luz Elena Ramirez
Department of English
University of Texas at Austin

A Critical Review of Frederick Bennett's Computers as Tutors: Solving the Crisis in Education

Link to our message forum on Issues in Computer-Mediated Education
Part I
    By Gina M. Siesing

  • Frederick Bennett's Computers As Tutors: Solving The Crisis In Education is published in its entirety on the World Wide Web at http://www.cris.com/~Faben1/.

  • Computers as Tutors frames itself as a controversial argument in the context of a society that generally denies the need for "revolutionary" change. As educators in a computer-mediated environment, we find the book's forceful proposals about the ways that computers and appropriate software can enhance learning for many different kinds of students generally thought-provoking and at moments inspiring. However, Bennett's argument is sure to spark controversy, even among those who already support the thoughtful integration of computer technologies into school systems across the nation.

  • In his prologue, Bennett succinctly asserts his thesis, that "schools can use technology more effectively, and for the welfare of students, teachers and the nation, they must do so." His goal in writing the book is to "hasten" the kinds of discussions that will lead schools, parents, and government to "remake education" according to the plan proposed in Computers as Tutors. As the detailed engagement of this review will show, he does accomplish this goal for us.

  • As editors of CWRL E-journal, we appreciate the logical design of the book, which uses the hypertextual medium effectively to allow for various reading strategies: readers can elect to view the entire book as a single file, to examine a major section of the book at one time, or to read chapter files individually. Short paragraphs with frequent section breaks and effective use of font size and color make the text highly legible for a book-length webbed document. From the summary page, which explains key claims of the argument, readers can link directly to the chapters that most interest them. The title page includes both a "mailto" and a snail-mail address, through which readers can send comments to the author.

  • Bennett's contentious position can be summarized by a claim from Section II, that "the need to remake education is arguably the preeminent problem in America, because it is the root cause of other major difficulties such as crime and racism." Many educators and social change workers in various fields will recognize a series of potential fallacies in this claim: While Bennett's explanation carries sufficient rhetorical force to provoke thought and perhaps positive action, it seems also to lose some credibility as the solution to "the crisis in education" in light of the need for a complex understanding of the problem and for appropriately diverse solutions.

  • The second paragraph of the prologue compares schools' implementation of technologies unfavorably with businesses' use of the same available technologies:
    American businesses have made gigantic strides in the competitive global economy, and a large part of their gain has resulted from better applications of technology. Schools, despite their acquisition of millions of computers, continue to waddle along as they have for eons. They waste the power of these machines and reap negligible educational benefits from them.
    While his assertions about the effective integration of computer technologies into the world of "American" business may be accurate, the analogy gives one pause. While Bennett may be comfortable with the "gigantic strides" that capitalists in the United States have made in this nation and throughout the world, educators may eschew the competitive, neocolonial model of economic success at the expense of others' relative poverty. The other potential problem with this call to action is the fact that "millions of computers" indicates abundant resources in U.S. public schools, while the reality for many school systems is scarcity of funds for new textbooks and no funds at all for leading-edge computers and software.

  • Despite the tone that this first analogy sets, many of Bennett's stated goals are admirable and widely shared by educators: through better use of computers in schools, he asserts, "illiteracy would be eliminated, ordinary students would make massive gains, and restraints on bright students would dissolve"; teachers would "reach a new level of importance, ... accomplish more, and ... have greater job satisfaction." Beyond enabling young people to "compete on the market," education improved through computer use would, in Bennett's view, make those who participate in the proposed system better readers, better thinkers, and happier people.

  • A clinical psychologist and computer programmer, the author uses the historical anecdote of James Bryant Conant to frame his argument in Section I about the need for higher quality education in the United States, particularly in the inner cities. The "fulfilled prophecy" mentioned in the first chapter are the riots, or rebellions, of disenfranchised Americans that have erupted in recent decades. "Despite the absolute accuracy of Conant's foresight," writes Bennett, "leaders and officials continue to ignore what Conant saw as the underlying and precipitating cause of the destructive force -- lack of education." In addition to the connection he draws between poor education and rioting, Bennett also notes correlations between illiteracy and crime, as well as between illiteracy and need for welfare. The unmentioned factor that would make these claims of correlation more persuasive is the underlying reason for lack of education: lack of money. Similarly, the "true solution" in chapter two needs to include a plan for funneling money into the inner cities, because sufficient resources are incentive and prerequisite for participation in the school system.

  • Despite its singular focus on effective use of computers, without explanation of how schools and parents can afford the computers, Chapter Two offers eloquent and compelling evidence of the extraordinary benefits of computer-assisted learning for particular groups of students. A resident of Sarasota, FL, Bennett uses the schools in his state as a case study to illustrate the kind of successful revolution through computers that he advocates. Students at risk of dropping out before high school graduation have begun to learn and to graduate or pass their GEDs at unprecedented rates in Vero Beach, FL. Other schools in the Florida system and beyond have successfully adopted the Vero Beach model of moving at-risk students from their mainstream classrooms to the computer-mediated environment. As Bennett asserts, the Vero Beach model could be fruitfully emulated, not only for remediation, but for acceleration of learning: "Another result from this program mimics the outcome in the high school: children entering the program are behind most students academically; those leaving are often ahead of many ordinary students who avoided the at-risk category." The positive effects of enjoyment and diligent scholarship certainly suggest that this model would have similar benefits for students in mainstream classes.

  • According to Bennett, a shift in the role of the classroom teacher accounts for the success of computer-based instruction: psychologically or emotionally, teachers have traditionally engaged or "reached" some of their students effectively, but for other students they have embodied the alienating aspects of school. In the "computers as tutors" model, "[t]eachers encourage students, but computers teach." Teachers, in this system, become coaches, fostering their students' engagement with the computer software from which they apparently enjoy learning. Bennett reassures teachers, who might feel threatened by his proposal, that "[i]t will, at the same time, emphasize the importance of human teachers as they allow computers to do what computers are uniquely equipped to do: teach." In Chapter Five, readers can find an explanation for the importance of pleasure in learning, including an interesting list of key reasons why learning in schools is not currently pleasant for many students, and, in Chapter Four, the author offers a list of reasons to keep teachers in the schools, along with the computers that will teach the curriculum. The remainder of Bennett's argument proposes answers to the concerns raised by these claims:

  • In challenging educators, government officials, and parents to adopt his proposal, Bennett urges his audience to imagine the future: "A century from now civilization will judge if the educational distress in America in the last years of the twentieth century led ultimately to profound improvement of schools, or to more terrible consequences. The latter alternative could include the end of America as a world leader." But why should the goal of U.S. education be to maintain or recapture the status of "world leader"? Is this an appeal to pathos, or a statement of Bennett's investment in nationalism and economic supremacy? Certainly, readers will notice a conflict between the author's stated goal of providing an educational model that other nations can share and his stated goal of wanting the United States to outstrip other nations on performance tests. Perhaps competitive capitalism is one cause for the crisis, rather than the arena in which we should strive for success.

  • In Section II of his argument, Bennett reads the goals of education as tied almost entirely to the goals of capitalism: "Dry, simple statistics about the nation's educational weaknesses don't dramatize the devastating human suffering. The riots emphasize this side of the crisis. They often seem to begin as a reaction to racism. Even if cities eliminated racism, many youths who took part in the riots are virtually unemployable. They lack the education required for most jobs." But if cities eliminated racism, they would concomitantly funnel money into schools in poorer districts, most often the predominantly non-white districts.

  • Bennett's enthusiasm for Vero Beach schools as the appropriate national model shows in the rhetoric of his vision of revolutionary change: "When American education fully embraces computerized education, the dreadful state of American schooling will change virtually overnight." The adverb "virtually" is crucial in this last clause, because both cautious and willing educators will ask themselves important questions about the revolution: "What about cost, and what about support for faculty as they learn their new roles and work to integrate the computers into their curricula?" When envisioning the consequences for the United States if we refuse to spark the revolution of Computers as Tutors, Bennett articulates a nasty, slippery slope for our nation: we must swiftly "revitalize the education of the hordes of students who are at-risk to drop out and to become pariahs in a technological world." We, the audience, are asked here to envision the marauding bands of disenfranchised youth whom we will soon see roaming the neighborhood if we collectively fail to make the computer revolution.

  • In order to explain why youth have stopped enjoying school, Bennett invokes the myth of the "good old days," when mothers read to their children and fathers reviewed math homework with their sons and daughters. However, these "good old days" were also a time when fewer working-class and middle-class children graduated from high school and considered college a possibility. Bennett writes, "Concerned educators legitimately bewail the home conditions of many of their students. They make the valid argument that a return to the life in America of twenty-five or fifty years ago would improve education." By referring to these "family values" arguments as "legitimate" and "valid," he fails to adequately differentiate his position from the social programs of the radical right, who most often articulate such "family values" rhetoric in the service of sexist, racist, and homophobic initiatives.

  • To Bennett's credit, he explains persuasively that "America" must find a way to reverse the legacy of slavery by improving education for African-American children. However, his historical understanding of educational injustice and its ties to economic racism does not extend beyond the enslavement of Africans in the U.S. While Bennett's point that education in a multicultural and multilingual society presents particular kinds of challenges is valid, he presents this point in the form of a skewed and troubling metaphor about immigrants as a predatory mass that troubles the otherwise feasible functioning of schools in epidemic proportions: "These rivers of immigration bring hordes of new students that descend upon schools each year." The rhetorical tropes of family values and the racist images of "immigrating hordes" seem at odds with Bennett's generally thoughtful approach to public education that will serve all students well; these moments detract from the overall ethos of the argument.

  • The claim that "[c]oncerned educators legitimately bewail the home conditions of many of their students" suggests that all dedicated educators share this perspective. While some "concerned educators" do no doubt blame the reality of non-nuclear families for the decline in students' abilities, other concerned educators find more damaging causes for their students' learning deprivations: the growing gap between those who can afford to stay home with their children and/or hire tutors and those who must work long hours; the same gap between those who live in predominantly white, well-funded school districts and/or send their children to private schools and those who must send their children to under-funded public schools where salaries are particularly low, textbooks are old, computers are outdated if present at all, and classrooms are overcrowded.

  • Bennett writes, "Even in two parent families, both parents often work outside the home. Sometimes the income of one is insufficient, and both must be employed. Women also work because they find it enjoyable and challenging to participate in the commercial world, and can hire domestic help. Whatever the reasons, many parents fail to take the active role in the school work of their children that educators seek" (emphasis added). Not "sometimes," but in more cases than not, the income of one average woman or man is insufficient to support a dependent adult and raise a child. Rather than pointing to a change in cultural values, Bennett might more accurately and productively indicate the economic realities and trends that force people to work long, hard hours for subsistence wages or slightly above. Most U.S. citizens cannot afford domestic help; most are working-class like those who go into domestic service or middle-class and unable to afford domestic help. Parents do not "fail" because they've become unwilling to help their children learn; the current economic system with its underlying values fails to offer parents the time to teach their children well.

  • Like most parents in the United States, most people throughout the world find the kinds of multimedia applications that Computers as Tutors envisions in every school prohibitive in cost. Chapter Six, "Computers--The Answer," urges U.S. citizens to implement the proposal because, "[w]hile the rest of the world races into modernization with blinding rapidity, education continues on its familiar and well trodden path." Because it lacks the economic resources of the upper eschalons of the United States, the "rest of the world" does not "race into modernization," if "modernization" means use of leading-edge computer technologies.

  • The end of Chapter Six offers a list of common objections to Bennett's proposal. He concludes the section with an engaging plea to read through his explanation of how his plan accounts for, or obviates, the various hesitations that readers might encounter:
    Some of these objections are valid and some are merely specious. All must be addressed. Answers to these difficulties will be brought out in subsequent chapters. Responses will be summarized in the final chapter. If any reader might be tempted to move there from this point, I must say "Whoa! Don't jump to the last chapter now! That's legal when you are reading mystery stories, but is forbidden in books on education. We'll get there, but some groundwork must be in place."



    Part II
    By Luz Elena Ramirez

  • Although Bennett considers objections to his proposal in Section IV, Section V begins by provoking a new set of objections. Many of these are based on the slippery slope logic of the first half of Computers as Tutors. More specifically, Bennett assumes that discomfort with computer technology in the 1960s and 1970s was based on Orwellian fear. He writes in Chapter 18 that parents and educators: "feared authorities under the guise of "progress," could foist machines on students and employ these lifeless but adept mechanical monsters to tamper with the minds of children. They anguished that these new instruments could bring a mechanistic world where machines dominated learning, and students became more like automatons than humans."
    Bennett then explains that "these wild fears" are misguided and at this point he invokes the rhetoric of hysteria to bolster his own position. Again, he demands a radical shift from the sometimes haphazard or incidental use of computers to full systemization. Ironically, his proposal follows the same patterns of Orwell's 1984 that he dismissed earlier. That is, in computerized education, students will be monitored by computers and have equal or more contact with them than with their teachers or their peers.

  • Computers as Tutors seeks to allay fears about the loss of the individual and confusion about teacher roles by focusing instead on issues of efficiency. Bennett argues that teacher roles will change dramatically as paper work is eliminated. He assures us that by cutting down on paper work, teachers can spend more time on conducting seminars, workshops, research, and their own professional development. This seems reasonable except that the time, energy, and know-how to shift from a non- or semi-computerized school to a fully automated one are considerable and perhaps daunting. As an instructor in a computer-assisted classroom, I am aware of the training it takes to adjust to new technology. Even among the most enthusiastic and well-organized of teachers, the transition is sometimes difficult. Human communication skills are essential when computer glitches arise and under a fully automated system, these skills become secondary. But granting that a shift to a wholly computerized system is possible, I would like to respond to Bennett's claim that computers will give teacher's new freedom.

  • Teacher freedom, Bennett contends in Chapter 19, will stem from liberation from paper work. However, while a computerized system may lessen paper work and paper print outs, assessment and data entry are still necessary to teach. Therefore computers do not necessarily cut down on work. Instead, they change the form of record-keeping from paper to computers.

  • Furthermore, Bennett does not adequately consider the psychological effects of computerized environments. While classrooms could be made architecturally and ergonomically attractive to educators and students, more often than not they would read as an institutional space. Even today, teachers often struggle with design problems in classrooms-- lack of windows,bolted-down chairs, and florescent lighting. Environments are obviously important in learning, not only for students, but for educators as well. Many people accept the relatively low-pay of education in order to avoid the ubiquitous cubicle of American industry. Bennett, however, re-envisions and implicitly, if not explicitly, celebrates education for American corporate culture.

  • Daily use of computers requires attention to detail and the ability to think about systems operating with each other. Computers also require students and teachers to learn problem-solving skills because of the very limitations of software and hardware. These skills would benefit most any discipline, but especially mathamatics and sciences. My main contention with Computers as Tutors is that it offers only cursory consideration of the humanities. Bennett states that computers, along with seminars and weekly activities, can enhance learning and stimulate higher thinking. Still, these things cannot replace oral creativity and human contact.

  • Bennett admits that teachers are responsible for encouraging creativity and individuality, but his celebration of what I call a "data identity" suggests otherwise. Computers as Tutors advocates the use of a leader teacher who will have
    "access to all scholastic records of their individual students. The computer will provide information about every subject, and instructors will know if their pupils are progressing, or are deficient according to the norms for finishing school by an approximate age. In turn, students will always be aware if they are advancing sufficiently fast pace, because the first objective of teachers will be to ensure that the students are on track to reach the basic goals."
    A "data identity" is one that can be read only on a computer. It has the paradoxical nature of both revealing too much and not enough. For example, if a leader teacher is aware of everything a student does, then that individual has no sense of privacy. Moreover, both failures and accomplishments assume the same computerized face. While it is important to know how students are progressing, the constant and obtrusive ranking of individuals distracts from the learning process. Contrary to what Bennett suggests, students are not the sum total of math, language, or science scores. Computers and their records emphasize this kind of data identity.

  • As I suggested earlier, Bennett emphasizes issues of efficiency and effectiveness to allay suspicions about totally computerized environments. Chapter 20 follows the course of an imaginary leader teacher, Mary, in her daily activities. Mary attends meetings, presents conferences, records important data, and has time to prepare for a seminar. She is, in sum, an exemplary educator.
    But Mary keeps a schedule that, with the use of computers, would be very difficult to follow unless every system she used functioned perfectly, all the time. Bennett consistently elides the fact that computers are only the sum total of people who manufacture, operate, maintain, and use them and his full computerization requires a perfection of efficiency and effectiveness that we, as humans, do not have.

  • Moreover, if we rely mostly on the web for information and materials, then the inclination to explore outside of the computer classroom becomes secondary. There must be, in short, a balance between computerized environments and material ones. Computers cannot replace the experience of reading a book. Moreover, one's attention spans wane after hours of looking at a computer screen. Ironically, Bennett suggests that student's will only spend 6 hours a day.

  • Bennett does elaborate on the importance of student and teacher interaction, but the downside of introducing "leader teachers" must be given careful consideration. While it is true that they could systematically trace their students' development, it is also true that such information could negatively impact learning, especially when all that teacher has available are computer files and, compared to today's standards, infrequent meetings with students.

  • Bennett explains that while additional instructors will share their expertise, the leader teacher will be solely responsible for maintaining records and will be the person parents meet with in conferences. Again, in theory the idea of a leader teacher as a mentor is an excellent one because it would give students an opportunity to develop a long-lasting relationship with an educator. However, in practice, personality conflicts may arise that would be exasperated by the use of a primary instructor. Just as the consideration of multiple points of view is important in writing, so too is the consideration of multiple assessments of student performance important in education. Thus, the idea of a leader teacher prevents thoughtful and multi-layered assessment of student performance.

  • One strength of Bennett's book is that it offers a clear overview of how education has changed from the sixties when bigger schools meant better funding for teachers, supplies, and extracurricular activites. He has illustrated how educators are now trying to move away from the big school phenomenon to smaller, more manageable schools.

  • Computers as Tutors also revolutionizes the way we think about grades and grade divisions. Bennett advocates the elimination of both in schools. Instead, he wants computers to evaluate student performance, but is unclear as to how computer "standards" differ from grades. What is his distinction between computer standards and grades? Both are based on teacher evaluation-- whether that evaluation comes from a report card or a computer seems to be beside the point. As in many of his claims, Bennett creates a sort of invisible presence in his computerized classroom that magically assesses, records, and encourages students. As I have contended earlier,computers are programmed by people-- and in this case "standards" that pit one student against the other on a computer screen differ little from our present system except that they publically exacerbate the feeling of mediocrity or failure.

  • Perhaps the greatest contention I have with Computers as Tutors is that it aims to please educators, parents, and administrators rather than students. Students are, in fact, the last party to be considered in the benefits of computerized education.

  • In sum, Bennett's book demands a re-evaluation of our present modes of learning and teaching. His claims, while controversial (especially those relating race and poor education to crime, welfare, and rioting), nevertheless open a hypertextual space for discussion. As editors of the CWRL, we encourage respondents both to his book, and to our review of it. What works currently in computer-assisted instruction and what could be made better?