While such experience in high school may not be directly relevant to K-4, it should nevertheless give one pause about the supposed beneficial effects of calculators in general. No one denies that calculators and computers are essential in certain aspects of mathematical instruction, but in the absence of any long-range scientific study of their impact on students, their use in the classroom needs to be accompanied by a great deal of circumspection. Such circumspection seems not to have been exercised thus far. The de-emphasis of drills and of the need — even in mathematics — to commit certain basic facts and concepts to memory is the natural pedagog- ical.
