Mostly Wrong Questions From a High Tech Heretic

By Keith R. Krueger

There is nothing like a controversial title to sell books, and Clifford Stoll's anti-computers-in-the-classroom treatise High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom & Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian (Doubleday, 1999) is chock-full of clever, but largely off-target, points.

Mr. Stoll, the author of a previous bestseller, Silicon Snake Oil , makes sweeping attacks on efforts to link all classrooms to the Internet. He steals a page from Todd Oppenheimer, the author of a July 1997 article in The Atlantic Monthly called "The Myth of Computers in the Classroom," and tries to expand that theme into a book around this hot topic.

The premise of the book answers the question "Should schools have computers in the classroom?" Mr. Stoll gives an unequivocal "No," citing page after page of examples where computers and/or the Internet have been misused. He sets up a straw man—that advocates of school networking want "computer literacy"— only to huff and puff till he...