April 1, 1997

European Politicians' New Mantra:

Wiring Up Schools to the Internet

By BRUNO GIUSSANI

OME -- In Luigi Berlinguer's vision, future classrooms will have split desks.

"On one side of the desk the child will have space to read and write, while the other half will be equipped with a personal computer hooked up to the Internet," he said.





He is hardly alone. Getting "every school and every schoolkid on the Internet" is the new mantra of European politicians.

Of course, this is yet another American idea that took a few years to cross the Atlantic and overcome initial skepticism and derision.

No European public figure has yet been seen digging holes and physically wiring a schoolhouse, as Bill Clinton and Al Gore have done in California -- an altruistic action that incidentally happened in front of television crews during the presidential campaign. But from Tony Blair, Britain's opposition leader, who dreams of "class sizes of one," to President Jacques Chirac's crusade to get more French content on the Web, the combination of education and information technology (IT) is now suddenly flashing across the continent and becoming a key political battleground.

Politicians are well aware that most European countries (with the exception of the Scandinavian ones) need urgent and significant public investments in education, the implementation of innovative and cross-disciplinary teaching and a wide range of new educational opportunities for all ages.

Yet, all but a few of the recent initiatives are more likely to serve the politician's own marketing than to really help enhance the educational standards.

Most of the projects lack credibility and a global vision. They are built on the simple premise than having computers in classrooms equals educational progress -- which is far from being necessarily the case.

Consider the following examples:

In Germany, a program called Schulen ans Netz (Schools on the Net) has been solemnly launched by the nation's technology minister, Juergen Ruettgers. It is aimed at wiring 10,000 schools within three years. The government will invest about 23 million German marks ($14 million) while the likes of Deutsche Telekom, AOL, Microsoft and Novell will offer free accounts and software. Yet such meager financing will be just enough for every school to get a single Pentium PC and an access software package. A mere 20 percent of the money will be allocated to pay for training teachers.

"I want every secondary school wired by the year 2000," French President Jacques Chirac of France declared mid-March on public television. Yes, "I want": a regal privilege of every French head of state. "We've to develop our efforts to disseminate more French-speaking content on the Web," he added. This made the whole country laugh out loud, as until five months ago Chirac didn't know what a computer mouse was. (Last fall as he was inaugurating the new national library in Paris he stunned those in attendance by asking what that bizarre plastic object sitting besides the PC was).

In Switzerland Beat Kappeler, the president of the government's Information Society Committee, has just called for every school to be "immediately" connected to the Internet. But the move is intended more as a way to help with the current difficult economic situation "by giving work to a lot of small local businesses" than as a future-oriented strategic decision.

In the United Kingdom, where citizens will elect their new government on May 1, both the Conservative and Labour parties are heralding their infobahn projects. Conservatives, who have held office for the last 18 years, introduced a Superhighways for Education Initiative a few months ago. Some 2,000 schools already have Internet connections, but the key role in developing the infrastructure is left to the private sector, "not only in finance, but also in developing innovative applications," said Ian Taylor, who is Science minister. Tony Blair, the Labour leader, has also turned the "computer-on-every-school-desk" idea into a major electoral issue. Yet he's focusing almost exclusively on the infrastructure. Blair has struck a deal with British Telecom. In return for access to the cable-TV market -- from which the company is now legally debarred - British Telecom will "connect every school, college, hospital and library in Britain, for free," Blair said in October 1995 launching his long campaign. The deal is still valid, but a global strategy is not in sight.

In Italy, Luigi Berlinguer's initiative caught people by surprise in a country where most schools still don't have at their disposal basic equipment like overhead projectors or video recorders and where some don't even have enough "normal" plain desks to comfortably accommodate all the children.

In June the minister plans to start distributing 150,000 personal computers and training 100,000 teachers on how to use them. In other words, each school will get 8 to 10 machines and six skilled teachers -- figures that are light years away from the vision of the "split desk" with a PC and an Internet account for every Italian child.

Internet access will be given through Telecom Italia Net (TIN), the new national network born from the merger of Telecom Online -- the Internet subsidiary of the public telecommunications company -- and Video Online, a pioneering ISP gone bankrupt last year. But according to official documents, access will be granted by TIN for 18 months only.

After that, no one knows who will pay and schools are likely to be left to fend for themselves -- "pedagogical autonomy" as it is called in the subtle Italian political slang.

Certainly, there is a positive side to Berlinguer's project. Since the basic task of schools is to socialize the youth -- to "reproduce" social values and behaviors - they are necessarily conservative institutions. Culturally, a large part of the Italian school system is still living in the last century. Technology has always been ignored. Distributing computers and Internet software and trying to integrate them in the curricula is a giant leap forward. But specialists wonder if such a change can really be done in just about 1,000 days. Bureaucratic legacies are heavy. Teachers and parents can't even send an e-mail to the Ministry of Education, since it's not equipped.

For all the investments and promises, the biggest challenges are hardly considered by most of these projects: tackling the technological ignorance of many teachers and developing new pedagogical models and guidance that include the Internet.

Very often teachers are afraid to cope with things children and students are better skilled at -- like computers. A survey by Keele University last year pointed out that three-quarters of Britain's teachers seldom use computers in lessons. A lot of them, trained in more traditional pencil-and-paper methods, even refuse the Internet as a tool for possibly enhancing and modernizing learning.

Technophobic reactions range from the conservative "you don't learn at school how to drive a car, so why should the school teach you how to travel on the info highway?" to the left-wing and more elitist "I prefer helping kids to get original ideas and a critical mind than having them play with a computer."

Let Father Roberto Busa answer.

He's a Jesuit priest and, at 84, the best-known Italian specialist of St. Thomas. He wrote: "Not to inform children and teen-agers that they will have the Internet at their disposal when they enter the workforce: do you not find this would be immoral?"



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Bruno Giussani at eurobytes@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.