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.

There's a tendency to make jazzy educational software that's very uniform and therefore just like school. I'd like to see a company develop software for rebellious kids who don't want to go to school.

I think Disney is a very interesting company, and it does have an extremely powerful means for projecting a certain way of thinking.

I think we should allow for schools within schools, where 100 out of 500 kids may be organized by the way they work and what they do, and what they do often is more progressive. I would like to see a lot of kids of different ages, maybe even some adults, work together on a project.

Nothing could be more absurd than an experiment in which computers are placed in a classroom where nothing else is changed.

Rather than pushing children to think like adults, we might do better to remember that they are great learners and to try harder to be more like them.

What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate