To the Lakeside School Board of Trustees and Head of School Bernie Noe

As a recent graduate of Lakeside, I want to express my concerns about your decision to require laptops of all students at Lakeside. I have grave reservations concerning the consequences of your decision for the school that I treasure, and I want to impress upon you this, which I firmly believe and am uniquely positioned to say: laptops will not change Lakeside School for the better.

Let me preface this letter by explaining that I have no fear of technology or of its careful integration into the Lakeside environment. I love computers to a fault and have spent a huge portion of my time since sixth grade programming, administering, and repairing them, for both fun and profit. During my junior and senior years at Lakeside I was largely responsible for its email system. I worked closely with Network Manager Michael Asbridge since his arrival at Lakeside, and US Technology Coordinator Andy Barker since my freshman year. I spent six years in Lakeside classrooms learning from and building close friendships with teachers.

From this position, I say that bringing laptops to Lakeside cannot possibly benefit the substantive work of the school -- learning and teaching -- enough to justify the huge social and economic costs. As I am sure you are aware, such a large and sudden infusion of technology carries with it huge inconveniences. Stealing laptops is very easy. Software still cannot run reliably enough -- especially on laptops -- to allow teachers to ignore the basic inadequacies of the technology and use it purely as a tool. Lakeside will accumulate a huge overhead of lost time and money just keeping the laptops running consistently for all students -- resources that could be better spent elsewhere. If Lakeside adopts a centralized server architecture in order to reduce the costs for each family, purchasing large commercial machines to do most of the studentsU92 processing and requiring notebooks with limited capacity, graduating seniors will be left with essentially brain-dead machines that their college will certainl y not support. Incoming students will be unlikely to want to purchase these used machines, as their original limited capacity will have fallen far behind the current standard.

These are all technical problems with solutions, given enough time and money; I do not believe laptops should be abandoned solely for any of these reasons. I have only two substantive objections: by increasing the costs of attending Lakeside by $1,000 to $2,000 laptops will reduce Lakeside's already poor socioeconomic diversity, and, by far the most important, laptops offer Lakeside nothing that can justify their costs.

For all its efforts, Lakeside consists mostly of upper-class families. A quick look at the student parking lots as compared to the general traffic on I-5 confirms this largely unavoidable fact. Though Lakeside offers financial aid and so is theoretically open to families from all economic backgrounds, I have learned from Seattle-area friends at college that the greater Seattle community nonetheless sees it as an exclusive place of wealth. In large part, this image of the school determines whether families will even consider sending their children there. Adding laptops not only increases the very real financial burden on current families, but also makes Lakeside more exclusive and unattainable, preventing even more families from considering it in the first place. Most likely the sheer financial burden of the laptop requirement would drive away from Lakeside those students who would have most benefited from having laptops -- those without access to computers at home.

While the business of Lakeside will go on no matter what background the students come from, awareness of the existence of the middle class and the economic realities of life outside the upper classes was already absent from much of the student body while I was a student. This does not bode well for the future quality of Lakeside graduates. If the school is truly committed to the diversity I heard so much about during my time there, to having its students experience a taste of life outside the upper classes -- if it is committed to producing students who are at least aware of their privileged position in society, then it must immerse them in that diversity daily -- and it cannot drive away so many talented but less privileged students by requiring laptops.

Even this unfortunate loss of diversity might be acceptable if, say, the remaining Lakeside students were going to be learning twice as well once they had laptops in hand. And here is the crucial point: laptops will not help Lakeside students learn. For all their 21st century appeal, laptops will not help students of history, English, Spanish, biology, physics, or calculus in any way that the more economical technology already in place at Lakeside cannot already achieve.

Laptops are inherently ill-suited for liberal arts classes. While they might be used for note taking or electronic paper revision and submission, typing notes in class forces the student into an unnatural linear thought process -- though laptops create a slickly formatted final product, students cannot make connections and revisions on the page with anywhere near the speed or intuitive comfort of pen and paper. Similarly for electronic paper revision -- while seemingly more environmentally friendly and convenient, most everyone will end up printing out drafts and marking them up by hand anyway -- it is simply confining to work on a screen. These are not simply my opinions -- a look around my classrooms at Stanford reveals very few laptops. Though I have many friends who own them, almost all prefer to take notes and revise papers by hand, and the same situation is apparently true at Dartmouth, which as I understand it currently requires laptops.

Were all these problems to be resolved, this incredibly expensive tool would still fail to significantly enhance the actual learning process in liberal arts classes. Learning occurs in these courses when a student has absorbed the texts and intellectually engages the teacher and his peers in the broad arena of actual human discussion, not when he mechanically transcribes the class into his laptop.

Even in technical classes, laptops will not add any utility beyond what the current classroom computers already provide. Taking math, physics, or chemistry notes is totally impossible on a keyboard. The computing power of modern laptops is far beyond what a high school physics or biology lab could possibly utilize -- even in my physics and electrical engineering courses at Stanford, I have not used any computer significantly more sophisticated than those at Lakeside. While the students might save some time by taking their lab data home rather than manipulating it at school, such a small gain hardly seems worth the huge infrastructure and costs of introducing laptops in the first place.

So I say again: Lakeside does not need laptops. The teachers are fantastic, and the facilities excellent. The students do need to be facile with computers if they are to employ themselves in our society, but Lakeside already provides large, well-equipped and under-utilized labs in which students could be required to demonstrate proficiency. The money and energy could be better spent on so many things -- teachers, for example, with whom Lakeside lives or dies as a true place of learning, rather than as a hollow institution with a reputation as a 21st century school.

Sincerely,

Colin Campbell
Lakeside School '99
ccampb@stanford.edu