This report grew out of a February 1999 gathering in Spring Valley, New York - the founding of the U.S. branch of the Alliance for Childhood. The Alliance is an international effort of educators, physicians, and others who are deeply concerned about the plight of children today, and who believe that only by working together in a broad-based partnership of individuals and organizations can they make a significant difference in the lives of children.

These are our fundamental beliefs and concerns:

• Childhood is a critical phase of life and must be protected to be fully experienced. It should not be hurried.
• Each child deserves deep respect as an individual. Each needs help in developing his or her own unique capacities and in finding ways to weave them into a healthy social fabric.
• Children today are under tremendous stress and suffer increasingly from illnesses such as allergies and asthma, hyperactive disorders, depression, and autism. This stress must be alleviated.

A follow-up meeting of the Alliance's partners and friends with expertise in the field of children and computers raised further, more specific concerns. They suspected that the benefits of computers for preschool and elementary school children were being vastly overstated. They felt also that the costs - in terms of money spent, loss of creative, hands-on educational opportunities, and damage to children's physical and emotional health - were not being accurately reported. They decided to research and document the facts and to publish the results. This report is the fruit of that effort.

During the past year a number of individuals have worked hard to prepare this report, in particular Colleen Cordes, former reporter on science and technology policy for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Edward Miller, former editor of the Harvard Education Letter. We are extremely grateful to them and those who contributed to the report for the excellent work they have done.

In this report we focus on children in early childhood and elementary education, for the data seem clear that computers offer few advantages in these years. There is still much work to be done on the question of how to introduce computers safely and effectively for older students. We welcome an opportunity to work with other concerned groups and individuals on these questions.

This report will be distributed widely in the hope that an open and spirited conversation will result. Democracies thrive when social change is accompanied by public debate in which all points of view are explored. In this case, it has been so widely assumed that computers are essential in childhood that there has been almost no public debate. We hope this report will stimulate conversation and lead to healthier and more considered policies on computer use in childhood.

Joan Almon, U.S. Coordinator
Alliance for Childhood

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Alliance for Childhood gratefully acknowledges the following individuals for their assistance in reviewing, editing, or writing individual sections or chapters of this report: Dr. Jeffrey Anshel, author of Visual Ergonomics in the Workplace; Alison Armstrong, co-author of The Child and the Machine: How Computers Put Our Children's Education at Risk; C.A. Bowers, professor emeritus of education at Portland State University; Dr. Edward Godnig, author of Computers and Visual Stress: Staying Healthy; Story Landis, senior investigator in the Neural Development Section of the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; Jeffrey Kane, Dean of Education at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University; Lowell Monke, assistant professor of education at Wittenberg University; Kate Moody, executive director of the Open Gates Dyslexia Program at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston; Douglas Noble, author of The Classroom Arsenal: Military Research, Information Technology, and Public Education; Mimi Noorani of the Alliance for Childhood; David Orr, chair of the Department of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College; Stephen Talbott, editor of NetFuture, an online newsletter on technology and human responsibility; Richard Sclove, founder of the Loka Institute; and Langdon Winner, professor of political science in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The Alliance also thanks Matt Wasniewski, Kim Kash, and Patti Regan for proofreading the report.