A big story came out of T.C. Williams High School here in Alexandria, Va., on Sunday -- and I’m not talking about Barack Obama’s speech to more than 3,000 enthusiastic supporters in the school’s gymnasium, although that would certainly qualify.

I’m speaking, instead, about a remarkably blunt opinion piece that appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post by long-time T.C. English teacher Patrick Welsh, a frequent contributor. It’s titled “A School That’s Too High on Gizmos,” and that’s putting Welsh’s views mildly.

Welsh feels the school and the district are in the grip of what a former Alexandria superintendent calls “technolust” -- the craving for more, more complicated, and more expensive electronic gadgets, largely independent of their impact on student learning. It’s technology for technology’s sake, Welsh says, not technology in service of something greater.

Welsh offers numerous examples. The $495 per-unit hand-held “school pads” that enable teachers to underline something displayed on the classrooms’ ceiling-mounted LCDs (“another way to waste money for people who are too lazy to write on the board,” one teacher says). The classes where every student has a laptop and where -- unbeknownst to teachers -- some are busy playing the online “Helicopter Game” and surfing the Net. And, most disturbing of all, a sense that teachers and administrators are spending more time on their computers than with actual students.

“We’re becoming like a correspondence school, where all communication is faceless,” one long-time teacher says.

The story seems to confirm my long-held fears about overreliance on school technology. I remember, for example, several years ago when I visited a West Virginia upper elementary school, and a teacher gushed over the ability of her students to put together PowerPoint presentations. Called me curmudgeonly, but I’d have rather seen them put together a well-reasoned argument.

I could be all wrong. A few months ago, I spoke with the principal of T.C. Williams (who comes under some pretty withering criticism from Welsh), and he insisted that technology is radically changing the way we acquire information -- indeed, the very way we think. Read Daniel H. Pink’s book A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, and you might become a believer too.

I did. Well, almost. The fact is, I’m over 50, and I sort of like my old mind. I love the newspaper (all those sections, nicely divided), books with weathered pages, and -- best of all, to my mind -- the most wonderful technological innovation yet invented: the glorious acoustic piano.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor