The Chicago Tribune – Bill Mego
“When the Soviets launched their first sputnik, or satellite, the idea was to scare the pants off President Dwight D. Eisenhower by showing him that the USSR could drop a bomb anywhere on earth. What they actually did was to supercharge scientific education in the United States like nothing else ever could. Naperville Community High School, for example, upped its science classes and began a truly innovative extracurricular program for a limited number of students called Science Seminar. And the University of Illinois began a teaching program called Plato, using what were then advanced computers. Plato stood for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations and was far different from the teaching methods of Plato the man. At the time, however, it was thought that the introduction of computers in the classroom would revolutionize education, that computers were the future of teaching. And always would be, as the joke goes, because we’re still saying the same thing today. The trouble is that we haven’t made it work. It was recently found, for example, that students in online charter schools do much worse than students in even mediocre regular schools.”(more)