Book Review: More Than a Tool?, Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds–For Better and Worse

Jane Healy has organized Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds-For Better and Worse into three sections: an overview of the current status of children and computers, a discussion of the interrelationships between computers and the growing child, and a look at the successful uses of information technologies in homes and schools and a glimpse at what the future may hold. The book could easily have been split into three or four separate books, as Healy herself admits. Faced with such a broad landscape and in spite of her long list of references, we struggled to find the basis of some of her many opinions. The reader is constantly trying to figure out what the author is advocating; is it a positive or a negative opinion of computer use with children? Her attempt to present both sides of the issue and remain neutral on the use of technology leaves the reader with the dizzy feeling of disorientation throughout the first half of the book. No doubt about it, though, using the word FAILURE in a book title is sure to get the attention of educators. But whose failure is Jane Healy referring to in this fast-paced, sometimes infuriating book? Are the computers failing? Or are the students failing? Should we be scrutinizing teachers or, perhaps, parents and taxpayers? Or, perhaps, our profit-driven businesses or the philistines in our midst who confuse “information” with “knowledge.” Healy has captured for our attention a host of culprits and, using a veritable arsenal of very recent references (over 300 ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Robert Sternberg’s Successful Intelligences), relentlessly takes potshots at one and all. And easy targets they are. How can anyone doubt, after the horrors of Columbine High School, that “computers, used incorrectly, may do far more harm than good,” as the book jacket puts it? Violence-aggrandizing computer games and sick virtual realities can be very damaging for susceptible young people. But is J. EDUCATIONAL COMPUTING RESEARCH, Vol. 24(1) 93–97, 2001