Doug,

Add another parent perspective to the collection on your great website ---

I first formulated my position on the laptop requirement back in 1998 as I read "Lapping it Up" in the Weekly. Judy Lightfoot impressed me so much with her courageous candor that I cut the article out, insisted my son read it, and placed it in a special folder which would become our first Lakeside file. It's yellowed now but I still keep it in the file. Frankly, I felt very proud of myself for having encouraged my son to attend Lakeside; here was a school which tolerated open dissent (at least for a while) in its quest for intellectual excellence, despite pressure to conform to the public image of its most famous graduates.

And now, three years later, the laptop decision has finally been made. I know well-educated parents and faculty are not likely to mistake power point presentations, glitzy graphics or tons and tons of information for meaningful content. Not likely to confuse organization with understanding or e-mail with communication. I feel pretty sure about that because most of us were educated in a challenging face-to-face social and intellectual environment. We will always view computers as tools, never as teachers. But I wonder about our children. I am disturbed to think that we may one day share only nomenclature. I can imagine the teacher becoming the tool as the laptop becomes the teacher. I can imagine students in class competing on line to retrieve other people's ideas and retreating from their own. Still, the temptation to just let it happen and stop complaining.....

Good teachers challenged us in class to remember what we had read, to analyze or synthesize ideas right in front of everyone else. It was good for us to stand on our own, to offer up our ideas and judge them on the merits. And I don't remember ever spending a class period in high school looking things up in the library or reading quietly at my desk; high school teachers could be fired for wasting precious class time that way. (And it is precious - the luxury of communing with people sans politics, sans profits, sans interruptions.) We looked up to the best teachers; their lectures inspired wonderful class discussions which sometimes followed us into the lunchroom or out into the parking lot after school. Some of our high school teachers even became our friends.

Now that we are the parents, we send our children to Lakeside so they can enjoy the advantage of more inclusive discussions in small classes with great teachers. So, let the great teachers teach.

I have read most of the parent letters posted on this website. Most offer cogent personal and professional reasons for rethinking this laptop requirement. But I hear more casual comments all the time. Just today I heard some parents talking at a Lakeside athletic event. They gamely tried to find reasons for going along with the decision but admitted to each other that there really didn't seem to be any. The fact that laptops are perhaps most useful for science and math projects led one of the parents to suggest that the math and science departments be given laptops for students to use during class. I like that idea - owned by Lakeside, maintained by Lakeside, carried around all day by nobody.

Speaking for myself (a gift from my best teachers), I neither appreciate nor accept the various arguments in favor of the requirement. They all seem to dissolve into the one: inevitablilty. "Laptops are the future of education." I forget who said that. (Surely this is not what the Founding Fathers meant by e pluribus unum.)

Laptops in class weaken the teacher-to-student and student-to-student bonds which are the proper center of education. So for me the debate is really about the importance of insisting on a time and place for students and teachers to focus on each other. I think we're about to decide (at Lakeside and beyond) whether our children will value these intimate and, yes, vulnerable relationships which transform learning lessons into discovering humanity. Soon enough our children will go out into the world and use laptops, or whatever they evolve into, even more often than they might like. To exclude laptops from daily class life is not to reject them outright; this is ultimately not about the laptops.

Kathleen Bors