Tools or tasks?

We can't let the computer craze distract us from true education | Joel Belz

I can't quite decide whether our nation's huge emphasis on computer education is wrong because it distracts from true education, or because it teaches a false philosophy of life. In virtually any school, public or private, you'll find computers to be the fad that won't go away. While educational budgets of every other kind tend to languish-look especially at teachers' salaries and libraries-it seems easy in every setting to find someone to step forward with megabucks to make sure the school's computer lab is "state of the art."

I'm not a Luddite when it comes to computers. I am composing these words on a handy Macintosh laptop which is probably more crucial to my life than our family car. Especially since 1984, when the early Macintosh computers began to revolutionize the field of publishing, I have marveled that God brought along such highly leveraged changes just in time for us to apply them to WORLD magazine, which we started in 1986, and to our series of children's magazines, which were first published in 1981.