Wasn't sure if this should be under BS or not, as one aspect could be music related and I think it is an important topic for discussion. If someone feels it should be moved, please do so.
I heard an interesting interview of an author in NPR, today and think it is well worth listening to; it will be available later today at www.npr.org.
The title was The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved by Todd Oppenheimer. Here's the info bit from NPR - An estimated $70 billion was spent to put computers in U.S. schools in the 1990s. But do computer-savvy students translate into better educated students? In his book The Flickering Mind, Todd Oppenheimer says technology in the classroom can actually get in the way of the learning process.
You can read portions of the book at www.amazon.com.
I can't find the exact quote, but one of the things which really stuck with me is that earlier in the 20th century, humans could recognize or distinguish between over 300,000 different sounds; then it dropped to 150,000; children, today, have lost even more and dropped to 100,000. THIS is important to music, obviously, and he noted that music programs etc. have lost out to the drive to include technology in every classroom.
From the bits I heard, he found that children are losing out on a bunch of very fundamental skills by using computers at the grade school level and he would advocate no computers in schools until the junior high stage,as I heard it. He said between schools which used the latest in computers and ones which researched topics the old-fashioned way, in the latter, children had a much greater depth understanding of their research subject, etc. than did their counterparts in the techno-advanced schools. The technos seemed to be more impressed and able to remember what they had learned of the techno-tools rather than the subjects they were to study using those tools.
He had much more to say, so I would urge anyone who is interested to listen to the audio at NPR.