Unplugged By David Gelernter Summary

David Hillel Gelernter, born on March 5th, 1955, is professor of computer science at Yale University. He graduated from Yale University with Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in classical Hebrew literature in 1976 and received his Ph.D. from S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook in 1982. Throughout the 1980s, Gelernter made many praiseworthy contributions to the tuple space coordination model in the field of parallel computation. In June, 1993, Gelernter was permanently injured on his right hand and eye after opening a package sent by the Unabomber. After his recovery, Gelernter later recorded the incident in his book “Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber” which was released in 1997.
Gelernter is the author of many books including Mirror Worlds

In this essay, Gelernter discusses that while the idea that computers have the potential to be very beneficial in schools, technology in the classroom has put a damper the education in America’s classrooms. He believes that although computers can quickly and easily provide answers for children, they lack the ability to make a child understand the material their reading and just gives them a quick solution instead. Multimedia for example, provides children with visualizations and “candy-quoted books (212)” to assist with comprehension—as a result, children do not receive an in-depth understanding of the text and only receive the broad ideas. This also affects how children read and their opinion of books, and as a result, books “look less appealing to them”. Gelernter believes that with the age of multimedia, it is only a matter of time that making children read straight from a text book will be considered a waste of

He states that hypermedia is “a way of presenting documents onscreen without imposing a linear start-to-finish order.” This does not allow children to understand the concept of plot or create logical arguments which are both incredibly important to a child’s education. He infers that by using hypermedia, readers become ignorant of the story and as a result, the solution for the writers is to create shorter stories, more simple ideas, and decrease logic.
Lastly, Gelernter states that the problem is much broader than multimedia and hypermedia, but also calculators. In Japan, calculators aren’t used until high school because teachers want to strengthen students’ mental abilities. Gelernter states that calculators lead to the philosophy that “drilling addition and subtraction…is a waste of time”. He states that if this is true, than by not enforcing simple math skills, students’ mental abilities cannot develop