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society. "Each time we have tried to work together," says Marie Therese Lemay of St. Jerome, "the federal gov- ernment has cornered Quebec." A mirror frustration with Quebec is mounting in English Canada, where fif- teen years ago tens of thousands pleaded with disgrun- tled Quebecers: "Please stay, and we'll work it out." Today, Lome Caughill, who heads the Ontario group "Canada Eirst" (formerly "Commitment Canada"), is busy calculating the cost to English-speakers if Quebec splits. Caughill told a Toronto newspaper in June his new attitude toward Quebec: "You can go, but you go under the terms of the Canadian government ... not your terms."

Still, any exit is far from assured. Polls suggest that if a vote on separation were held today it would be a stretch to reach a simple majority. Compared to success- ful secessionist groups elsewhere, says political scientist Daniel Salee of Montreal's Concordia University, Que- becers "don't suffer enough." Another obstacle to a smooth split is the claim by Quebec's native populations to two-thirds of the province's territory. If held up in court, a rump independent Quebec could be left with- out many of the natural resources that have helped drive its economy. And then there is the domino effect of secession, which could rumble to the east and west, where other provinces are compiling their own lists of financial grievances. "There must be a maximum num- ber of disputes a country can have at once," says Wat- son. A separatist win this month will certainly increase the number of disputes. The only questions are what will be the cost and who will pay it.

JENNIFER LUDDEN is a reporter with National Public Radio affiliate WBUR in Boston.

The myth of computers in the classroom.

UNPLUGGED By David Gelernter

O ver the last decade an estimated f2 billion has been spent on more than 2 million computers for America's classrooms. That's not surprising. We constantly hear from Washington that the

schools are in trouble and that computers are a god- send. Within the education establishment, in poor as well as rich schools, the machines are awaited with nearly religious awe. An inner-city principal bragged to a teacher friend of mine recently that his school "has a computer in every classroom ... despite being in a bad neighborhood!"

Computers should be in the schools. They have the

potential to accomplish great things. With the right soft- ware, they could help make science tangible or teach neglected topics like art and music. They could help students form a concrete idea of society by displaying on-screen a version of the city in which they live—a pic- ture that tracks real life moment by moment.

In practice, however, computers make our worst edu- cational nightmares come true. While we bemoan the decline of literacy, computers discount words in favor of pictures and pictures in favor of video. While we fret about the decreasing cogency of public debate, comput- ers dismiss linear argument and promote fast, shallow romps across the information landscape. While we worry about basic skills, we allow into the classroom software that will do a student's arithmetic or correct his spelling.

T ake multimedia. The idea of multimedia is to combine text, sound and pictures in a single package that you browse on screen. You don't just read Shakespeare; you watch actors per-

forming, listen to songs, view Elizabethan buildings. What's wrong with that? By offering children candy- coated books, multimedia is guaranteed to sour them on unsweetened reading. It makes the printed page look even more boring than it used to look. Sure, books will be available in the classroom, too—but they'll have all the appeal of a dusty piano to a teen who has a Walk- man handy.

So what if the little nippers don't read? If they're watching Olivier instead, what do they lose? The text, the written word along with all of its attendant plea- sures. Besides, a book is more portable than a com- puter, has a higher-resolution display, can be written on and dog-eared and is comparatively dirt cheap.

Hypermedia, multimedia's comrade in the struggle for a brave new classroom, is just as troubling. It's a way of presenting documents on screen without imposing a linear start-to-finish order. Disembodied paragraphs are linked by theme; after reading one about the Eirst World War, for example, you might be able to choose another about the technology of battleships, or the life of Woodrow Wilson, or hemlines in the '20s. This is another cute idea that is good in' minor ways and terri- ble in major ones. Teaching children to understand the orderly unfolding of a plot or a logical argument is a crucial part of education. Authors don't merely agglom- erate paragraphs; they work hard to make the narrative read a certain way, prove a particular point. To turn a book or a document into hypertext is to invite readers to ignore exactly what counts—the story.

The real problem, again, is the accentuation of al- ready bad habits. Dynamiting documents into disjointed paragraphs is one more expression of the sorry fact that sustained argument is not our style. If you're a newspa- per or magazine editor and your readership is dwindling, what's the solution? Shorter pieces. If you're a politician and you want to get elected, what do you need? Tasty sound bites. Logical presentation be damned.

Another software species, "allow me" programs, is not much better. These programs correct spelling and, by

14 THE NEW REPUBLIC SEPTEMBER 19 & 26,1994

applying canned grammatical and stylistic rules, fix prose. In terms of promoting basic skills, though, they have all the virtues of a pocket calculator.

I n Kentucky, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, students in grades K-3 are mixed together regardless of age in a relaxed environment. It works great, the Journal says. Yes, scores on computation

tests have dropped 10 percent at one school, but not to worry: "Drilling addition and subtraction in an age of calculators is a waste of time," the principal reassures us. Meanwhile, a Japanese educator informs University of Wisconsin mathematician Richard Akey that in his country, "calculators are not used in elementary or junior high school because the primary emphasis is on helping students develop their mental abilities." No wonder Japanese kids blow the pants off American kids in math. Do we really think "drilling addition and sub- traction in an age of calculators is a waste of time"? If we do, then "drilling reading in an age of multimedia is a waste of time" can't be far behind.

Prose-correcting programs are also a little ghoulish, like asking a computer for tips on improving your per- sonality. On the other hand, I ran this article through a spell-checker, so how can I ban the use of such pro- grams in schools? Because to misspell is human; to have no idea of correct spelling is to be semiliterate.

There's no denying that computers have the poten- tial to perform inspiring feats in the classroom. If we are ever to see that potential realized, however, we ought to agree on three conditions. First, there should be a completely new crop of children's software. Most of today's offerings show no imagination. There are hundreds of similar reading and geography and arith- metic programs, but almost nothing on electricity or physics or architecture. Also, they aiDuse the technical capacities of new media to glitz up old forms instead of creating new ones. Why not build a time-travel program that gives kids a feel f'or how history is structured by zooming you backward? A spectrum program that lets users twirl a frequency knob to see what happens?

Second, computers should be used only during recess or relaxation periods. Treat them as fillips, not as surrogate teachers. When I was in school in the '60s, we all loved educational films. When we saw a movie in class, everybody won: teachers didn't have to teach, and pupils didn't have to learn. I suspect that classroom computers are popular today for the same reasons.

Most important, educators should learn what parents and most teachers already know: you cannot teach a child anything unless you look him in the face. We should not forget what computers are. Like books—bet- ter in some ways, worse in others—they are devices that help children mobilize their own resources and learn for themselves. The computer's potendal to do good is mod- estly greater than a book's in some areas. Its potential to do harm is vastly greater, across the board.

DAVID GELERNTER is a professor of computer science at Yale University.

An alternative to refugee camps.

PITCH THE TENTS By Barbara Harrell-Bond

O nce again, this time in Zaire and Tanzania, humanitarian agencies are responding to a refugee crisis by forcing refugees to live in camps as the precondition for receiving relief

Relief programs are built on the notion that these crises are temporary departures from normal life. Nothing could be further from the truth—or more perverse. Forcing refugees into camps actually prevents the reconstruction of social life. It also wreaks environmen- tal havoc and breeds discontent. According to a spokes- person for the United Nadons High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the current camps in eastern Zaire, which hold an estimated 800,000 people, are "in a vir- tual state of war." There are better solutions.

To begin with, it's debatable whether refugee camps even save lives. Growding refugees together ensures that they are at greater risk to disease. Morbidity and mor- tality rates escalate. (They are certainly underreported: refugees try to conceal deaths to retain food entitle- ments.) There is not even proof that over the long term the lives of infants who qualify for special feeding are saved.

Not all camps are entirely closed, but where confine- ment is total, such as the prison camps in Hong Kong, or where camps are so remote that there is no access to alternative food, nutrition-related diseases and high death rates are inevitable. The food supplied is too often inappropriate (milk, for example, a staple of many aid packages, is not universally tolerated) or unfamiliar (canned goods, brown rice, crackers, pasta). Conse- quently, people do not know how to prepare it. To make matters worse, there are no international standards for what constitutes an adequate diet. Thus, nutrition- related diseases in camps are common. Most recently, there have been epidemics of pellagra in Malawi and, yes, scurvy in the Horn of Africa.

Large concentrations of people also strain the envi- ronment. An early report from Tanzania found that Rwandan women from the Benako camp were walking five kilometers for firewood; two weeks later they had to venture fourteen kilometers. Deforestation, of course, leads to ever-greater environmental damage. There are other problems. Water sources, for instance, become polluted; this, in turn, breeds more disease.

And there are less visible effects. Life in camps fosters social and economic vulnerability. The emphasis on per

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