The big motto out of the United States, in the 1990s, seemed to be, “Build jail cells, not classrooms.” Again and again, politicians would promise to shrink the bloat in school budgets while Fighting Crime; I shared some of their skepticism toward the edutocracy. Washington, D.C., was Exhibit A here. In one recent year the city had shelled out half a billion on public schools but paid just $2 million for books.

Suppose, however, that U.S. schools had been spending their money in a way that helped keep children out of jail and helped them learn. Americans might do well to study Park View Education Centre. It is a high school up in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and something weird and wonderful had been happening there over the past few years. At Park View the Internet was not reserved just for the usual suspects—the would-be Bill Gateses, the local Steve Jobses, the prodigies who already owned PCs and Macs and were dialing up Christie Brinkley photos on electronic bulletin boards. Many of the children on the Net were the at-risk students, those in danger of leaving Park View because of academic or disciplinary problems.

They were in the “general-stream” track. And just as in the States, the college-bound children looked down on them. That was unfair. Many of the general students were bright and simply didn’t want to go to college. Some of the general boys, not all, wore black leather jackets, tight jeans, and black boots. And they used razor blades to tattoo the logos of Ford and Chevy onto their skins. The at-risk girls were less colorful. But some had disciplinary problems of their own, along with the same lack of interest in academics. What’s more, certain teenagers in the area were doing marijuana and hashish and boozing it up; teachers at Park View worried constantly that the wilder of the students would turn up on the police blotters.

Fighting against pot smoking and other behavior of the Jernigan variety, some teachers at Park View systematically used the Net to bolster the egos of the general students while also improving their scholastic skills. Yes, alarms went off in my head when I heard the word “self-esteem.” Too often, at least in the States, this quality came at the cost of academics. Saying, “You’re good!” was not enough. Gold stars—if dishonestly earned—would just teach the children that the educators were liars.

Some teachers at Park View Education Centre, however, were mixing self-esteem with reading and writing in a way that true Net nerds would love. And it was happening in a cash-strapped place a continent removed from Silicon Valley in both distance and technical expertise.

This was not borderline Canada. Park View Education Centre was a good two days’ drive from the state of Maine. The school served Lunenburg County, a mostly rural area settled by German-speaking people whose descendants still reverted to dialect. Bridgewater (pop. 9,000 or so) was the nearest town. Named for the modest bridge across the La Havre River, it was in many respects All Canadian—with streets with names like “King” and “Queen” and “Prince.” Businesses such as Gow’s Hardware and Rofihe’s Men’s Wear had been in the same families for generations. The Bridgewater area boasted a Michelin tire plant, too, and a mall and twin cinemas. And it was growing. But many inhabitants were displaced farmers, lumberjacks, and cod fishermen; tensions from work or the lack of it could show up in some homes, to the disadvantage of the children. When I was researching this chapter, Canada’s unemployment rate was 10 percent, while Lunnenburg County’s was 12-13 percent.

In at least one way, Park View Education Centre may have reflected both the business climate and the Canadian winters, or perhaps just some of the educational crazes of yesteryear. Park View was built in the late ’70s with narrow little windows that more or less cheated the classrooms of a river view. Those slots were somewhat emblematic; many children hadn’t been outside Nova Scotia. Even among the academic-track students, fewer than 40 percent were making it to college. Park View, then, was not quite the stereotypical place for educational high tech.

Still, the provincial government, colleges, and the business community had been quietly working with Park View and other schools to upgrade the workforce. In this spirit an education professor at Mount Saint Vincent University, in Halifax, organized a project called Learning Connections. Pitching in was the Nova Scotia Technology Network. One idea was to use computers to hook students in with employers by way of the Internet to give them a taste of the workplace. It would happen. But something would overshadow it—student-to-student communication over the Net.

Jeff Doran, a technophobic English teacher at Park View, wasn’t sure what to think when he first heard of the grand plans. His tenth grade class of general students did not exactly teem with computer nerds. Many of the children had flunked a grade. “Some of them had reading levels down around grade three or four. One or two maybe would have been considered at a grade ten level. I didn’t have any goal except to try to keep them in school and keep them in class.” He also had his share of questions about the project itself. “All we were told was that we would get some computers, and then we’d get this connection through the phone lines, and the students would be able to write to people around the world, and then when the project was over at the end of the year, we could keep the hardware. I had no idea what we were then going to do with it, and I certainly had never used it before.” Doran didn’t even own a television or answering machine. “I still had a phonograph. But I didn’t even have a tape player, and I had been writing on the typewriter all my life.”

But Doran had something else going for him, something even more helpful than technological expertise. And that was an abundance of good, teacherish skills and empathy for his students, even the ones with the tattoos. He himself had rebelled. A Harvard graduate, he had fled the United States during the Vietnam War to avoid the draft. Doran’s exact political beliefs weren’t the point here, though; a dare-devil Green Beret might have shown the same ability to brook the foibles of the general students. What mattered was that Doran cared more about results than about whether the children followed every little rule. Above all he cultivated rather than feared the students’ ability to think on their own.

The Nova Scotia Technology Network provided some technical help, but would not instantly answer every question. “So,” Doran recalled, “we did a lot of muddling through ourselves and a lot of teaching of each other. And that was one of the best things. Some of the students became teachers because they learned by experimenting, and then they showed each other. And invariably they showed me, and so I learned from them. The first thing I discovered was that there could be no front of the room. It had twelve computers in it that circled around the walls. And there was no way that I could stand at any point and demand everybody’s attention. I learned that in about three minutes of the first period.”

Significantly, Jeff Doran’s English class for general students had a one-to-one ratio between students and computers, a stark contrast to those in just about all other public schools in Canada and elsewhere. Students could use the machines not only for networking but also for word processing. In fact, they started using the machines so often that in those early days, Doran was holding classes in the computer lab regularly rather than in the scheduled rooms.

I asked Doran which students he remembered most vividly from those first days on the Net, and two came to his mind: Betty* and Mac*. Betty was the only girl of the twelve students on the first day of school. “She was, uhm, kind of an old-fashioned, sweet-faced girl,” Doran said, “with one of the foulest mouths that I ever encountered. Yeah. But she had to be to hold her own against these boys. She was surly and sullen and stubborn with me, and I don’t think she ever actually came to blows with any of the boys, but she came pretty darned close.” Betty was brighter than most in the class. And yet, feisty or not, she lacked self-confidence. Many would have written her off. More than a few teachers regarded the general classes as a dumping ground. “She was pretty unimpressed by what she could do in the computer room,” Doran said. “She at first was doing most of her assignments by handwriting.”

Meanwhile Mac was hardly off to the most promising of starts. His head was shaved into a Mohawk. A reform school alum, he was short and stocky and looked a bit like a small World Wrestling Federation champ, according to Doran. Mac’s face bore scars from the fights he got into. He would regularly pound the bejeezus out of other teenagers. “I’m not sure why Mac was in school,” Doran said. “It may have had something to do with the law—either school or jail. He was not happy to be here. And his skills were very, very low. He was about the lowest I had ever seen in a student.”

Okay, so this was the raw material. I didn’t expect Doran to turn either Betty or Mac into Oxford dons—everything was relative—but I wondered how far he had gotten with the computers and the Internet.

“Well,” Doran said, “once she finally started on the computer, she started writing more than she had ever written before. And I believe that’s how you learn to write, by writing.” She organized her sentences and paragraphs better, her vocabulary expanded, and fewer spelling errors popped up in her work—not just because she could spellcheck but because she cared more. Her scrawlings in a loose-leaf notebook hadn’t looked so impressive. But now she could use a computer printer and see the same, beautiful results as an honors student doing a ten-page thesis.

“The second big difference,” said Doran, “was that she was writing e-mail to other students. Suddenly she had an immediate audience. This wasn’t some make-believe English project where we would pretend to have a pen pal somewhere and pretend to write to them. This was a real person who was going to read that message and respond right away, and that kind of feedback made her, and made all of the students, suddenly aware of the importance of an audience. And an audience in writing is something that they had never experienced before, because the audience was the teacher and who cares what the teacher thinks? Except that the teacher gives you the mark, so you just write what you think the teacher wants you to say.

“But now Betty and the others had people who would write back and forth about their weekends, and their boyfriends, and their dates, and their sports, and their hobbies, and their cats, and so on. And I think it opened up a sensitivity to what was acceptable in print, and how your words can affect people, and the differences between people—especially over great distances, because a large number of the students that we were writing to in Vancouver were Asian. In fact they were fairly recent immigrants to Canada, so their English wasn’t that great. So actually Betty’s writing skills were better.” And that, in turn, helped her think better of herself.

Meanwhile Mac, too, was progressing. At the start Doran gave Mac and others a list of twenty words; they were then to look up the definitions and use the words in sentences. The time limit was four weeks. Mac needed the month. He couldn’t even cheat well; copying others’ work, he blundered because he did not know what he was cribbing. “The last thing that he could ever see himself doing,” Doran said, “would be sitting in front of a computer, you know, at a keyboard. With these beefy fingers of his, he was gonna tap away? I mean, that was out of the question.”

Doran, however, managed to stretch out Mac’s attention span to put up with the limits of the machines—to give them the detailed instructions they needed. In computerdom, people use the term “boot up” to mean turning on their machines or loading programs into them. And, Doran recalled, “There were times I half expected he was gonna literally boot this thing across the room.”

“Yes,” Mac snapped back at Doran, “I’ll boot the friggin’ thing up!”

“And yet,” Doran recalled, “within that one year he was writing messages to pals in other schools and to me as well.”

By then Betty wasn’t just sassing back the boys when they teased her. She was actually teaching them how to use the equipment. Her marks shot up to the 90s. Not content just to write a few short paragraphs, she was turning out well-organized letters several hundred words long in a professional-looking business format. That was unimpressive by the standards of academic students, but a true triumph for Betty; she even zapped off a paper letter to a suspense novelist she admired. The writing skills she developed on the Net had helped make this possible.

Simultaneously her opinion of herself rose to the point where she was one of the chattier participants in a video that Park View students helped make, and that was later shown on a Halifax television station. Students shot scenes to send across Canada to counterparts at a school in Vancouver, British Columbia. And Betty showed up again and again on camera. It would have been nice to write that she went on to college, but she did not. She ended up a waitress. Partly due to the Net, however, she surely was a better waitress—more at ease with her customers, and better material someday for management if that was what she wanted.

And Mac? “One of the last things I got from him,” Doran said, “was a message about how he felt he had been changing that year, and how he had been improving. And I agreed—I thought he had, too. And then just about that time, he pulled this stupid move and got drunk while he was on a class trip and got kicked out of the school.” But the story didn’t end then. “Mac moved to British Columbia and is gainfully employed. In the boys’ cases, the measure of success is that they are not in jail. In 1990, probably ten boys were at risk of failing and dropping out of school. Two were at risk of ending up behind bars or dead.”

Reflecting on past and present students at Park View, Doran noted the little triumphs which led to the big ones. The Net helped whet the children’s interest in school—to the point where, often, just about all the students in his first period showed up. It was a virtual miracle, given the sleep hunger of adolescents.

Clearly the Net could be a truant officer’s best friend. “I use computers a lot,” one enthusiastic student e-mailed me from Bridgewater. “I come in on any free time that I have, I even give up my lunch hour to play with the computer, but I would really like to have more class time in the computer room.” She said that computers “hold so much wonder to a person. Like me. Writing on a computer does help out with reading and writing skills.” Another student, a tenth grader who lacked a computer at home, told how much he’d enjoyed corresponding with an aunt and uncle in Winnipeg. At the time he e-mailed me, his relatives had just had a son, and his e-mail was going into their baby book. Textbooks alone would never, never have encouraged him to look forward to school the way the Net did.

I asked Doran if there were any test scores for the children to document the Internet’s benefits to the children at Park View. He said that scores by themselves would mislead since he had improved as a teacher in other ways. And yet he believed the Net had helped; since he couldn’t supervise the class constantly, he had learned to foster curiosity among the students as they explored the Net on their own. He and some other teachers in the experiment understood that they and the children would be learning from each other, that the old authority models were gone. The same trend was gradually happening in industry in Canada and the world at large. So if Doran wasn’t turning out Ph.D.s, he at least was creating better workers.

Other reasons existed for his success. The videotape reinforced the Net experiences. The Park View students looked forward to seeing their counterparts. Much more importantly, Doran let children use the Internet in ways that meant the most to them. The Net was like the videotape. Doran had expected his students to shoot pictures of quaint homes, of beaches, of the usual, touristy sites, when they were showing off the Bridgewater area. Instead the students photographed the places where they worked and shopped. And that told all. The e-mail was the same way; students would most benefit from the technology if it was on their own terms. At Park View, some virtual romances even developed between the students and those elsewhere. One boy wrote to a Florida school asking to be put in touch with a cheerleader.

Yet another explanation for Doran’s success was that students could spend hour after hour on their computer. So they had plenty of time for school compositions and for writing letters to friends in Vancouver and elsewhere. (That wasn’t true of all the students in latter years. Although Doran felt they did well, they might have done still better with more time.)

Perhaps most important of all, the machines didn’t put down the general students the way so many humans did. “It’s been my experience that the technology benefits the struggling student much more than it does any other student—in literacy growth, self-esteem, tech skills,” said Lorri Neilsen, the education professor at Mount Saint Vincent University who had started the Learning Connections project at Park View and elsewhere.

The positives aside, the Bridgewater experiment was not a complete triumph. “It’s very important to know the spirit of this project was carried by a handful of teachers,” Neilsen said. In fact, just eight of forty teachers in the school participated in the project. Skeptics were worried about it taking time away from the usual curriculum. Yet another problem was the authority question; some teachers had to know everything and were nervous about students learning behind their backs. A third complication was gender: Many female teachers were uncomfortable around technology.

Answers and solutions existed to all those challenges. In the case of academic students, I could appreciate the need to cover a vast range of subjects that colleges demanded. But with a TeleRead-style arrangement, just about all the major resources would be online anyway. Old material over a period of time could be scanned into the national database—a highly economical way to distribute it, and even better by archival criteria alone since unread paper material might well disintegrate anyway without anyone caring about it.

Even with the Net as it existed then, students of all kinds learned many shortcuts that enabled them to turn out better papers. The knowledge on the Net was far, far shallower on the whole than at, say, the Library of Congress in the States. But it may well have exceeded what the students could find in some small-town libraries. If nothing else, by logging onto the Net, they could learn how to stay up with the most current knowledge—no small edge in an era when new products replaced old ones in months rather than in years, and when academic journals proliferated.

What about the authority question? That could diminish in time if schools of education shifted gears and encouraged teachers to foster curiosity rather than have students focus just on textbooks and teacher-certified facts. Would it happen in the United States without a concerted, TeleRead-style effort? Maybe. But I doubted this.

If nothing else, public schools needed to give their teachers more time to master the hardware and the Internet so they would not feel so lost when their students roamed the Net; the equipment alone wasn’t enough. “Basic technology training is one of the most neglected aspects of educational reform,” said Andy Carvin, the Net-oriented educational expert at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “More often than not, when a school or a school district implements a major technology overhaul, teachers are introduced to the Internet and all of its tools in a day or two of ‘training.’” Carvin told me, and he was right, that teachers should enjoy regular use of the technology at home and at school so the knowledge wouldn’t fade away. Too, they needed to know how to “combine that knowledge with traditional teaching and curricula....It’s like learning to use a telephone—you can be taught to pick up the receiver and press a few numbers, but if you don’t have anyone else’s number or don’t know how to give out your own number it’s useless.”

I asked Lorri Neilsen about Canada, and she said that schools of education up there were making good progress toward correcting deficiencies. They had better. In the new era of giant databases there should be more emphasis on finding and evaluating information from many sources, and less on parroting textbooks. Teachers should encourage children to look for malarkey in all media, but especially on the Net, given all the self-publishing there. Perhaps with more women growing up with computers, female teachers in the future wouldn’t suffer so much from the old bugaboos about networks and smart, curious, uppity students.

That still left another issue—the possibility that students might send offensive messages over the Net and perhaps fixate on its wilder areas such as the alt.sex series of newsgroups.

“We did have a couple of cases of students in the school sending threatening and hateful messages,” Doran said, “but these were not my students. These were what I would call hackers, computer nerds.” Later Park View forced students to sign agreements under which they would lose their privileges if they abused the Net. This was not a hypothetical issue to me. As I was researching this chapter, I found “Fuck you all” in the subject line of a public message of a list devoted to educational uses of the Internet. A student at an American school had taken over someone else’s account. Making students sign agreements wasn’t a total solution, but it was a good one. If a student misbehaved and lost Net privileges, then he or she would be at a considerable disadvantage in competing with peers.

Addressing the newsgroup question, Park View filtered out the groups it deemed objectionable. I suspected that a smart student could circumvent these precautions, but if that happened, he might well have been intelligent enough to cope with the virtual temptations.

Off the Net, at any rate, students could just as well find questionable reading material. I remembered the pictures of Marilyn Monroe that my classmates passed around in elementary school back in the 1950s. Did anything change? Should we really deprive children of the glories of the Net under the assumption that the kids were all potential pervs? The best approach was the Park View—one making children sign agreements that they would be responsible for their own actions, and suspending or ending their much-cherished Internet privileges if they abused them.

Risks aside, the Internet was a natural place for students of all kinds. Only a fool would dwell on the hazards of the net to the exclusion of the possibilities there.

Would that all activities of government be as benign (well, for the most part) as those of the schools. In the next chapter we’ll learn about Phil Zimmermann and his brushes with the darker, almost Big Brotherish side of government.