The term “technology” usually conjures visions of futuristic creations: supercomputers, robots, interstellar spacecraft.  But technology is about hammers as much as high-tech gadgets.  Anything we create to reshape the world around us, from the earliest stone hand axes to the latest smartphone, is a form of technology.  Technology is the natural product of advances in science: new ways of understanding the natural world lead us to construct new tools to shape it.  We continue to improve our technology because we find out more about how it works and we incorporate that knowledge into the next design.

Throughout history, technology has defined how we lived our lives.  We talk about the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age in ancient times but also the Atomic Age, the Space Age, and the Information Age today.  Technology changes rapidly, even though the humans who make it don’t.  Stone Age humans, who hadn’t yet mastered metalworking, were anatomically identical to the humans of today; they were no less intelligent, resourceful, creative, or innovative.  The only appreciable difference between humans who lived 20,000 years ago and those alive today is the level of technology around them and the scientific understanding that enabled it.  New discoveries have been enabling technological advances to improve our lives ever since some inquisitive ancestors harnessed fire and used it to cook food, light up the darkness, and scare away predators.  A more recent example would be how our new understanding of electrons enabled us to build transistors, without which our ubiquitous computers would be impossible.  Each computer made today has more transistors inside it than there are people on the Earth.

Technology is a vast field of study, but it can be boiled down to a simple idea: all pieces of technology are tools, and all tools have ways of using them that are more effective than others.  Learning how to use technology requires learning what technological tools are most appropriate to solve particular problems.  To paraphrase the saying, just because you have a hammer doesn’t mean every problem’s a nail.  Yet most people who attempt to put “technology” into schools end up thinking just that: technology equals computers, so let’s give every kid a computer and we’ll be teaching them technology!

There are many problems that can be solved by computers, but they are not always the best or most effective method of teaching students about technology.  Sometimes, the very phones we’re constantly confiscating from them can be eminently useful in teaching about technology, for example.  Teaching and learning about technology, then, is not as simple as handing out tablets or laptops to children and declaring a school to be “high-tech!”  Learning about technology is synonymous with learning to effectively use technology.  There are better ways to use the power of the hundreds of millions of transistors in your smartphone than by sending texts during class, for example.

There are many problems that can be solved by computers, but they are not always the best or most effective method of teaching students about technology.  Sometimes, the very phones we’re constantly confiscating from them can be eminently useful in teaching about technology, for example.  Teaching and learning about technology, then, is not as simple as handing out tablets or laptops to children and declaring a school to be “high-tech!”  Learning about technology is synonymous with learning to effectively use technology.  There are better ways to use the power of the hundreds of millions of transistors in your smartphone than by sending texts during class, for example.

Indeed, one of the main objections to teaching technology in schools is the misguided idea that children already arrive at school knowing all about it.  Yes, their toys are the most technologically-advanced in history, but just because they’re surrounded by powerful technology doesn’t mean they know how best to use it.  They’re surrounded by more abundant food than at any point in history as well, but we wouldn’t expect them to go into a grocery store and be able to make good decisions about what they should eat for an entire week without some sort of instruction to aid their decision-making process.

To make students more experienced users of technology, they must be given the chance to interact with it directly.  They must be able to explore its power and its limitations.  Our technological tools are a marvel, but they can’t do everything (see cartoon at left).  This is why we are continuously updating and improving upon their capabilities.  From fire to fiberoptics, we’ve always been creating new ways to communicate, travel, explore, work, play, and generally exist in our world.  We will continue to develop new tools and improve on old ones, and students who are coming of age in this technology-dominated world need the skills to adapt and thrive in it. Teaching them to use and understand technology is our best bet.