Tracy Kidder turned an unlikely saga of a group of engineers developing a new mini-supercomputer into high drama with his 1981 book “The Soul of a New Machine.” He won a Pulitzer Prize for it in 1982, and Modern Library has now added the classic to its collection and published it with a new introduction by Kidder. He recently reflected on the computer age with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor.
Q. In your 1989 book “Among Schoolchildren,” you describe the life of a grammar-school teacher. With that in mind, what do you think of the notion that every classroom should have a computer?
A. Do you want me to get started on that?
Q. Absolutely.
A. After I had written “Soul” and it was the first book of mine that anyone read, I got invited to do lectures here and there. The most interesting one was in Columbus, Ohio. There was an awards ceremony, and the person voted the best high school English teacher that year was getting an award. She taught English at a trade school. They were bright kids, going on to a trade, and she thought it important that they knew the delights available in literature, and every year she would take her class to a Shakespeare play. But her administrators, in order to look advanced and up to date–and maybe they believed it made them advanced and up to date, and they were doing the right thing–had spent all the available money on new computers and there was no money now for her to take her kids to a Shakespeare play, so she paid for it out of her pocket. It’s a travesty.
I think computers are simply tools. What makes them seem different to us is that they are allied with intellectual work, but that doesn’t make them intellectual things themselves. Anybody who can read, write and think can figure out how to use a computer.
Q.Is there anything positive about children and computers in schools?
A.The only thing I imagine you accomplish by having a lot of computers in your schools is enabling kids to do some kind of work in a more sophisticated way than they did before. And possibly, when it comes to writing, it might be an inducement to them. Because it seems like fun, it might get them to do more writing. On the other hand, it might get them to waste more time.
There are all kinds of things that are wrong with computers as far as writing and thinking go. From doing a little editing once at New England Monthly, I remember a guy who did a story and I was trying to get him to fix it. All he would do in his rewrites was move stuff around. In the old days, when you had to put a new, clean sheet of paper in the typewriter, or do it by hand, you might ultimately be forced to say, `This whole thing is wrong–it’s ill-conceived and I can’t fix this by moving things around and I’ve got to start over.’ That ability to move stuff around is a real impediment to the development of consecutive thinking. Because it gives you the illusion of doing something. It’s absurd.
I also think that for math children should learn how to add, subtract, divide and multiply because they ought to understand what those things are rather than summoning a machine to do them. At some point, you create a bunch of people so stupid they wouldn’t know what addition was.
Q. So where would you have schools spend money, if not on computers?
A. I want the money to go toward making life easier for classroom teachers–to make their classes smaller, to get them the wherewithall to really pay attention to who these children are, and engage them at the right level and bring them to a new one. If there were plenty of money for everything else, fine, let’s have lots of computers in the schools. But let’s have people understand what sorts of risks–like every tool–they bring with them.
Q. Were you tempted to change anything in “The Soul of a New Machine” for its republication?
A. I was offered the opportunity to fix anything I wanted to, and I started to do that. I was going to fix a few things that had always bothered me, but I got through about 30 pages and there wasn’t anything on any page that I hadn’t started to change. So I realized that it would be like taking down a whole brick wall to get at one brick, so I decided to leave it exactly the way it was.
Q. “The Soul of a New Machine” has stood up better over time than many books about the computer world. Why?
A. For me, it either stands or falls because it is an interesting story with interesting people in it. It’s kind of hard for me to judge that.
