Old School Too

So Leelu wanted to know what I thought of Terry Pratchett’s Only You Can Save Mankind, one of his few non-Discworld books (the first in a trilogy, actually). It’s not as witty or wise as the Discworld books I’ve read (which aren’t that many, actually), but it was still good. It’s set in the early 90s during the time of the first Gulf War and the other President Bush, when computers were first becoming fairly normal and mainstream but before the advent of the World Wide Web. Johnny and his friends like to play computer games, the Space Invader, Galaga type where you fly a space ship and shoot up an alien fleet. The twist is that one of the alien fleets contacts Johnny to surrender because they don’t all want to die. Instead of mindless blips on the screen, they suddenly become real, intelligent lives and present him with a new moral quandary. I thought it was a lot of fun to get the alien perspective, that humans are just bloodthirsty killers who want to destroy them and aren’t willing to negotiate. They encounter the husks of Space Invader ships and other races the human gamers have wiped out in previous generations of games. I don’t know if I liked it enough to read the other two books in the series, but I enjoyed it and recommend giving it a try.

I remember when we thought of computers like this:

You never said to your parents, “Hey, I really need a computer because that way I can play Megasteroids.”

No, you said, “I really need a computer because of school.” . . .

And it was quite useful for school sometimes. Johnny had written “What it felt like to be different sorts of peasants” on it and printed them out on the printer, although he had to rewrite them in his handwriting because although the school taught Keyboard Skills and New Technology, you got into trouble if you used keyboard skills and new technology actually to do anything.

Funnily enough, it wasn’t much good for math. He’d always had trouble with algebra, because they wouldn’t let you get away with “What if feels like to be x.” But he had an arrangement with Bigmac about that, because Bigmac got the same feeling when he looked at an essay project as Johnny did when he was faced with a quadratic equation. Anyway, it didn’t matter that much. If you kept your head down, they were generally so grateful that you were not, e.g., causing policemen to come to the school, or actually nailing a teacher to anything, that you got left alone.

But mainly the computer was good for games.

I think this attitude of schools toward the latest technologies continues. Schools and teachers know they need to teach their students how to use computers, but they’re still iffy about what’s new. We continue to see students who aren’t allowed to used magazine articles that come from online databases because teachers associate that with “finding it on the Internet.” Or the way some try to outlaw email, blogs, wikis and other social networking tools instead of finding ways to incorporate them into their methods. The attitude hasn’t changed, just the technology.

Also, Johnny’s definition of sexism made me laugh:

”It just means you should treat people as people and, you know . . . not just assume girls can’t do stuff. We got a talk about it at school. There’s lots of stuff most girls can’t do, but you’ve got to pretend they can, so that more of them will. That’s all of it, really.”

“Presumably there’s, uh, stuff boys can’t do?”

“Oh, yeah. But that’s just girls’ stuff.”