Center for Writing & Learning
Journal/Issue 1

Note from the Director

In his 2017 book, Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris summarizes the plot of a late 1950s children’s book, Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine:

Danny and his friends use [a] professor’s cutting-edge computer to do their homework quickly, leaving more time for baseball and their other fun hobbies—like measuring wind speeds with weather balloons. These kids aren’t slackers; they just have better, more self-directed things to do with their time than homework.^[1]

When another kid rats them out, Danny “argues that all workers use tools to do their work better and faster and that students should not be prevented from doing the same.” The teacher, of course, doesn’t relent, and Danny is left with “a contradiction: Kids have to be taught how to use tools that will help them reduce their work-time, without it actually reducing their work-time.”^[2]

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