Children in todays world need to be familiar with computers, don they?
As far as the use of computers is concerned, you can hardly prevent this. As I once heard Joseph Weizenbaum say, kids absorb this stuff through their pores. They no more need special, computer-literacy education in the primary grades than they need toaster-literacy or automobile-literacy courses. You can’t keep them from learning it. In fact, it’s mostly the teachers who are racing around madly trying to figure out what to do with all these machines we’re bequeathing them; as often as not, it’s the kids who save the day. There are, of course, class differences in this regard; some kids have readier access to computers than others. But the point is that this access is not necessary for primary school children in the first place. Certainly the software they learn today will not be the software they need on the job.
