Great! Another dubiously effectual, yet definitively expensive, traffic-light camera, installed this time at Wellesley and Ash.

Rather than taking the time and energy to create better drivers, to improve the education of our present and future drivers, to discover the basic causes of red-light running, we choose to react. We simply install an expensive piece of equipment that will catch and help punish the offender. Problem solved.

At least at Wellesley and Ash.

Whether or not you consider the cameras legitimate, my main problem with this issue is larger. I believe our society is beginning to accept technology as a quick-and-easy cure-all to all of her ills.

However, our city’s decisions concerning law enforcement are only metaphorical to my main point. I wish to criticize public education’s current obsession with this social phenomenon of technology.

Recently, as a teacher in Spokane Public Schools, I have witnessed technology bonds that are put to our generous voters, technology committees that are constructed and filled by willing educators, technology bullet points that are added to official school-improvement plans, technology PowerPoints and videos that are massively e-mailed to all employees, technology seminars that are strongly encouraged for both schoolwide and districtwide professional development, technology sessions that are compulsory at state and national conferences, technology mandates that are put forth to local school districts by our state Legislature, technology requirements that are appended to teacher job descriptions.

By no means do I claim that this list is exhaustive. However, it is certainly exhausting for this professional educator.

Recently, I have been bombarded by my district and state to engage my students in the curriculum specifically through technology. The repeated argument is that these students, growing up as “digital natives” in our information-oriented culture, are very different from the rest of us “digital immigrants”; thus, we must make sure we reach them where they live – we must use technology daily in the classroom. (And, yes, the language is so strong that daily technology use is becoming a type of mandate for all Spokane Public Schools teachers.)

However, in all of this technological push (both by our district and our state, ultimately by our entire society), I have one great fear – that our bureaucratic educational system is doing nothing more than reacting to the newest and flashiest buzzword. And in doing so, technology is quickly becoming an end, rather than a means to an end.

(And yes, as a too-soon-to-be-40-year-old writer/teacher, I realize that my last paragraph is dangerously close to making me sound like an old fogy with acute technophobia. Such is not the case. Mine is only a warning.)

Ultimately, I’m afraid that this generation of techno-multitaskers is so in love with their technological wizardry that they are coming to rely on it exclusively. For example, for a district-mandated research project in my English class, my digital-native students all wonder why they can’t just “Google” something, point at the first entry that pops up, click on it, download it, and done! Research! Point, click, download, done.

And the entire educational industry is too easily falling prey to this new fad. For example, many of my district-prescribed curriculum’s end-of-unit assessments involve the students’ creating multimedia presentations rather than writing an essay. So, in order to display their learning in an English class, they would have to write excruciatingly little. Rather, they can follow technology’s new axiom: Point, click, download, done.

Lest we forget, technology will never grant students better literacy or writing or even critical-thinking skills; technology will never instill a solid work ethic into students; technology will never steer students away from plagiarism and cheating; technology will never actually teach students.

Just as the traffic-light cameras will never teach us to be better drivers.

I’m not arguing to toss out technology (either at major intersections or in the classroom). Rather, we should remember that technology is not a panacea; it is only a tool.

At least it should be, at the intersection of our classrooms and our curricula.