Published: November 3, 1998
To the Editor:
Re ''Don't Look Back'' (column, Oct. 31):
Frank Rich's look at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Diego, the ''downtown showplace for Silicon Valley's revolutionary accomplishments,'' stirred a long-simmering unease in me.
When I was a student in the mid-1940's at Brooklyn Technical High School, the technology we studied was far broader than chips, circuits and computers:
What makes an airplane fly? How do you make glass or steel or soap? How do you drill for oil? How is a newspaper printed? Why does a telephone work?
Today, from kindergarten through graduate school, technology is equated with the computer, its manufacture and use. We are in danger of becoming an idiot savant society, ignorant of all but the technology of Silicon Valley. Other countries will replace us in the realm of non-virtual technology if we persist on this path.
SIDNEY S. JACOBSON
Chester, N.J., Oct. 31, 1998