With a laptop for every public school student, eager learners have the world at their fingertips. But will there still be eager learners, or will students be mindless drones heedlessly surfing the Internet on classroom time? Computers are an invaluable research tool, and laptops render content imminently accessible—but accessibility has a downside. When every question posed to a student can be answered by a search engine, what happens to that student’s need to learn? Perhaps it will suffer the same fate as dusty books and desktops, vanishing in antiquity.
How does the author's word choice affect the tone of the excerpt?