The Core Knowledge Blog

Patrick Welsh, a 30-year veteran English teacher, goes to work every morning at one off the most expensive school buildings ever constructed. Opened last September, the $98 million T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia has “a cafeteria that looks like something out of an upscale mall” and its classrooms are packed with every technological gadget a teacher could imagine.

“So you’d think T.C. teachers would be ecstatic,” writes Welsh in the Washington Post. “But it’s just the opposite — faculty morale is the lowest and cynicism the highest I’ve seen in years. The problem? What a former Alexandria school superintendent calls ‘technolust’ — a disorder affecting publicity-obsessed school administrators nationwide that manifests itself in an insatiable need to acquire the latest, fastest, most exotic computer gadgets, whether teachers and students need them or want them. Technolust is in its advanced stages at T.C., where our administrators have made such a fetish of technology that some of my colleagues are referring to us as “Gizmo High.”

Welsh wonders whether all the gadgetry is actually getting in the way. “The big question isn’t whether teachers like spending their time learning one new gizmo after another,” he writes, “but whether a parade of new technologies will help kids learn. From what I can see, that’s not the case.”