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.

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.

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

You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.

Working with the computer gives rise to many opportunities to transcend asocial behavior, because it produces exciting and visually interesting things to share, whether it's by creating video games, computer art or sharing exciting Web sites.

Educators who have said, "We don't like that, so we'll continue to teach as if it's not happening," are just aggravating the gap between what happens in schools and what happens in the real world. Because of their personalities, or for cultural reasons, some kids might better express themselves through moving images and sound.