The 80s & Other Silly Things

I shall say what many refuse to say for fear that big hair and bright colors will overhear and come back to haunt the 21st century: the 80s were weird. For a decade that brought us the Breakfast Club, Indiana Jones, The Terminator, and The Princess Bride, it also brought us this hair style:

I never lived in the 80s, but I sure have benefited from watching these 'Classroom of the Future' videos made in 1987: http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/x30plj

They say hindsight in 20/20, and I do think that hindsight has the distinct ability to make us laugh at ourselves as a human race. Did you know that there was a Mexican president who served for 45 minutes? Or that Lichtenstein sent 80 people into battle against Italy in 1868 and came back with 81? 

It's these kinds of facts that allow me to laugh at myself and the 80s. If you haven't seen these 'Classroom of the Future' videos, they include lots of enormous chairs, computer screens in the walls of classrooms, and artificial intelligence. While these videos may have predicted FaceTime and SmartBoards, it fell short at AI, which to my knowledge still remains an issue for Star Trek enthusiasts dressed as Data to sort out. 

While I do think that these videos made a valid point in the importance technology would be to education 20 years later, I believe they overestimated it. Maybe because I was born less than 10 years later, I think that technology is slightly overused in the classroom. I learned in a time were you brought textbooks home to do homework, teachers wrote on chalkboards, and you took books out of the library for projects. I will admit that things have changed since I was in third grade, and I will admit that Google is now my trusty sidekick when it comes to writing papers, but I do think that we should draw a line when it comes to an overabundance of technology in the elementary classroom as this 'Classroom of the Future' showed us. 

But who knows, maybe 20 years from now I'll be sending my kids to school with computers in their bags and phones in their pockets. Maybe 20 years from now I'll chuckle to myself like I did this morning when a girl went riding by on a bike with two hands on her iPad and no eyes on the road.