HI-TECH?

Today, students spend longer time in school, have more subjects in their curriculum, and have more projects and extra-curricular activities. The school buildings are bigger, the rooms air-conditioned, the tuition sky-high. You would think better and more intelligent students will turn out from these schools. But take a close look. A lot of youngsters today couldn't do their math without the use of a calculator. They don’t even know that you can compute square roots minus the scientific calculator. They couldn't do their research works without the computer and internet connections. You see them with a lot of gizmos at their fingertips to do their school work. They can even text the network for thesaurus, current events, and watch a 30 -minute television news on phone video. But watch them panic when an important assignment is scheduled for submission and a power failure occurred just when the cell phone battery is empty.

When we enroll our children in school, we make sure that the school is of a standard acceptable to us. We check out their teaching standards, their computer lab, the rooms, the grounds, even the class population. We pay a lot of money so that they can use the school's online resources, and we investigate if their I.T. Instructor is any good.

But are we encouraging our children to be so technical and "cyber-dependent" and therefore helpless and lacking in resourcefulness? How are they going to cope without the hi-tech paraphernalia that is so essential to the students nowadays? Even when it comes to entertainment, they lean more on the latest that the tech world has to offer. There are not many students who like to read books. They prefer the television for entertainment, or watching DVD. Online games like Counterstrike and Ragnarok are also "in". Whatever happened to board games like scrabble and monopoly?

Maybe we should be encouraging our children to read books, to go camping, go on a nature trip or just tear them away from the computer once in a while. Let us make them aware that the brain didn’t go out of business at the advent of CPU. Technology has a lot of good things to offer. But so does the brain.