01/04/2026
Background: I owned a computer store for almost 25 years. During that time I tried to convince anyone that would listen to spend money on technology they needed, technology that would help them achieve a goal. I discouraged people to just spend money on new stuff. I saved people thousands of dollars, and companies tens of thousands, leading them to what they needed not what they thought they needed.
I had several opportunities to make that impact on government institutions. It just never happened. They were always happy to spend extra to achieve less. This page is dedicated to one niche of that spending: public education. They have gone beyond overspending and crossed into actually working against their defined mission-educating our kids. I'm also a father. What I have seen in our local schools, which mirrors national trends, is the reason we all need to get involved and do something. We are paying for our children to be made more ignorant and become more dependent on technology. Their brains are being underdeveloped. They aren't learning multiplication tables because they "will always have a calculator". They are being taught dependence, not how to rely on their own brain. This is insane!
Technology (we can have the AI discussion separately since it is relatively new) is a wonderful "memory" device. It stores the knowledge we have discovered and accumulated. Using my example, a calculator has the multiplication tables stored and spits out the answers so we didn't have to remember them ourselves. Technology does not think, it's just memory storage. It cannot replace the human brain in relation to creation, discovery and thinking.
Unless we believe we have discovered all the knowledge in the world and stored it in the archives of technology for reference then we still need to teach children how to think. You might argue there are even more reasons our kids need to think, but take that as the bare minimum.
I love tech. I enjoy tech. It is a tool that we are lucky to have. But we must use it for our betterment. We cannot teach our kids to become dependent on it. We cannot accept that our schools might teach them to be dependent on it.
-Thoughts from the Paper and Pencil Computer Guy
