Our goal in education should be to foster the ability to use the computer in everything you do, even if you don't have a specific piece of software for the job.

Now more people are doing work that requires individual decision-making and problem-solving, and we need an educational system that will help develop those skills.

Corporate America needs to get its act together to see that the education system is changed so it produces what it needs. The educational system that teaches kids to be passive recipients of knowledge worked when most workers were sitting in assembly lines.

Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization...I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.

My ex-student, Idit Harel, who wrote a book, "Children Designs," has a documented story of a kid who was very shy, isolated and didn't talk much to other kids. She was a little overweight, and the other kids looked down on her for that reason.But then she made a discovery about how to do something on the computer. The discovery was picked up by other kids, and within a few weeks there was a total transformation. This kid was now in demand. And that changed her feeling about herself.

We should think about what we mean by literacy. If you say, "He's a very literate person," what you really mean is that he knows a lot, thinks a lot, has a certain frame of mind that comes through reading and knowing about various subjects.The major route open to literacy has been through reading and writing text. But we're seeing new media offer richer ways to explore knowledge and communicate, through sound and pictures.

I prefer software where kids build something and run into problems they have to solve.