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.

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.

BASIC is to computer programming as QWERTY is to typing.

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.

Similarly, computer literacy courses tend to produce computer people who know a lot about computers or a piece of software but they don't help people become fluent with the machine.

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

We imagine a school in which students and teachers excitedly and joyfully stretch themselves to their limits in pursuit of projects built on their own visions … not one that that merely succeeds in making apathetic students satisfy minimal standards.