| | The schooling system is a natural attractor for sociopaths. You can get away with murder as a tenured schoolteacher.
What is taught by compusory schooling is that your natural interests as a slave-student conflict with education. If you like to learn, then you just haven't been there long enough.
As both a former public school student and a former teacher - both public and private Montessori - I, along with a small army of like-minded evangelists, went to schools in the late '70's and '80's to promote computer use in education. For the most part, both the private - including especially Montessori - and public schools treated us like lepers.
Even most of those schools whose administration wanted computers used them very ineffectively. Usually the computers were relegated to the "computer lab," instead of being integrated into curriculum, and when they were integrated into curriculum, they were used on an idiot level of simple workbooks or the use of canned software to generate printed papers or the equivalent.
A few courageous teachers did use the computers effectively and often went the additional mile of promoting them and offering to demonstrate what they had done and train other teachers as well, usually for free on their own time. They typically got zero takers, no matter how improved their students' test scores were. MIT's Seymour Papert demonstrated for the world to see how letting the kids create software enhanced their fundamental thinking skills enormously, but the world wasn't interested. At least, not the educational world.
Then, when computers suddenly became fashionable, all that had been learned painfully by the pioneers was forgotten. The kids are not using the computers to learn how to think - at least not in the typical classroom. They're just running the canned wordprocessors - MicroSloth Word, etc. - to generate non-computer output, or PowerPoint presentations at best.
They should be creating simulations of the classroom subject matter in Second Life, building avatars of Thomas Jefferson, recreating the Battle of Gettesburg, designing mathematical models of shuttle flights in Mathematica, building personal databases that incorporate everything they learn, as a permanent reference they can carry through their life... The tests should never be on how much they can personally cram into their biological computer, but on how quickly, accurately, and wisely they can access and integrate information on any subject from the world information universe.
Fortunately, most of them in the U.S. have computers at home.
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If schools had pre-empted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy.
