Until very recently, most knowledge was inaccessible to people who couldn't read text. But this is changing. The computer opens up other channels of gaining knowledge. If someone is blind, we now have very good machines that will read to him. If someone can't recognize letters, he also will have access to knowledge through sound and images.

I tell adults about the experiences of more than a hundred teachers I've interviewed. They tell me that allowing the child to help them learn helped them become better teachers. That's because they no longer had to pretend they were the experts - not only about computers but about other things.

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.

The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.

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 am convinced that the best learning takes place when the learner takes charge.

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.