If you’ve picked up a newspaper lately, you’ve probably read about Tom Vilsack’s latest promises to improve education in Iowa. And if you are a responsible college student like me, you probably skipped on to the horoscope for a chance to read something believable. But we have to stop being apathetic about our shrinking education budget.

Which is why I was appalled when the Ames Tribune reported that area elementary schools were receiving money to buy more computers. I’m not, of course, against computers in the classroom – I don’t know where I would be if “Oregon Trail” hadn’t introduced to me the joy of shooting rabbits. But I was very bothered when the article quoted Roosevelt Principal Dallas Rust as saying, “We’re hoping the wireless labs and new computers will increase the opportunity for students to write meaningfully.”

Now I don’t doubt that Rust is a perfectly fine principal who wants his kids to be the next Shakespeare, or even the next Tom Clancy. But sometimes, principals with the best intentions will miss the logical outcomes. To give an example: I bet someday, somewhere, a principal will think it’s a wonderful idea to give condoms to elementary school children, in the hopes that they (the children) will have safe sex practices grounded into them by the time they start having relations, which these days appears to be around the age of seven. But if anyone reading this thinks that this is a good idea, my advice is: DON’T DO IT – it just won’t work.

I know, because in fifth grade, the one time that my peers got a hold of a condom, they immediately invented a violent recess game called “Condom Ball,” which was exactly like handball except that the ball was covered with, well, a condom -supposedly to make it fly better. My point is not, though, to explain the physics of this game, but to say that if a principal thinks that children will use condoms or computers for “meaningful” purposes, he will be very disappointed.

On the other hand, there are many ways in which people use computers to communicate rather non-meaningfully. I refer you to an experiment run by Kevin Fox, a graduate student at Berkeley University. Fox opened up an AOL Instant Messenger account named “AOLiza” and set it up with an artificial intelligence script (originally written in the ’60s) so that whenever someone tried to talk to it, it would reply with a question or command, usually repeating back what the person said. Here is a sample exchange:

Human: you are the rev at the open door mission right?

AOLiza: perhaps you would like to be the rev at the open door mission, right.

And so on. Normal people, many of them past elementary age, would converse with AOLiza somtimes for over an hour. One person managed to go from talking about lobster fishing to spilling his guts about being dumped. If you think that mistaking a computer program for a person is the most pathetic thing ever – you’d be wrong. What’s really pathetic is that the AOLiza program is a Nobel Poet Laureate compared to most people I talk to online, since it at least knows how to use complete sentences and words longer than “LOL.” In fact, AOLiza was so charming that several people propositioned it for acts which I cannot mention in this family newspaper, except that it requires parts which computers have not yet been equipped with – as far as I can tell.

But we can learn from this episode that computers are equipped with something that manages to suck your intelligence out, to the point where the next version of Windows will include a pop-up message reminding you to breathe.

Considering all this, I have to protest the expensive purchase of computers for elementary – actually, any level of education, in these economically hard times. Besides, by the time the average teacher figures out where the “Any” key is when prompted to “Press Any Key to Continue,” the second-graders down the hall will have been able to hack into the Pentagon mainframe.

But if we must buy these computers, I must give this advice to the younger generation – if you are thinking about using a computer to communicate, please, for goodness sake, wear protection. Preferably something different than what you used during recess.

Dan Nguyen is a senior in journalism and mass communication and computer engineering from Iowa City.