However, in the meantime, a much more powerful process had come into being. This much more powerful process was that computers overflowed the boundaries of the school and were now becoming available to children in their bedrooms, in the studies, in the living rooms of their homes, in community centers, in all sorts of places where they’re outside the control of the school system and so outside the dynamic of its internal mechanisms.

In the United States today, we are looking at a situation where something like 60 percent of households with school-aged children have computers. In Britain, you’re probably a year or two behind that, but it is moving there. What happens outside is a significant new element in the dynamic of the evolution of the education system. Because we are now beginning to see children who had computers at home from the beginning of their lives. Not all children in this situation used them very effectively or had very rich learning experiences with them but some did. And those who at home had these richer learning experiences with the computer are beginning to appear in school as a kind of a nuisance because they are demanding from school--"Why aren’t we doing here what we know how to do at home?" So these children are beginning to produce a pressure on the school from within, a kind of subversive force coming into the system, not only demanding change but most important offering to help in that change. They are offering to make available a degree of technical knowledge and mastery not only of the computer as a machine but of the use of the computer as a research instrument and in many other ways that the teacher may not, in most cases did not, have the time and perhaps inclination to learn.

So we’re beginning to see a little foretaste of a greater situation to come at an almost precisely predictable time, because it’s only in the last three or four years that there has been a large number of children who have these computers at home and the opportunity to use them. The cohort of young people who grew up with a computer from the beginning has not yet hit school with its full force. It will very soon and when that happens, I predict that we will see inside the classrooms an eventually irresistible pressure to change the structure and the content and the nature of schooling.

This is a new kind of power. And I’d like to reinforce the point by making a distinction that should be obvious by now between what I am saying now as a predictor of change in education and the situation that education reformers in the past found themselves in.

It’s almost a hundred years ago since John Dewey, whom I think of as probably the intellectually deepest critic of the structure of school as I defined it in the beginning--curriculum, classes, etc.--began to formulate his criticisms of the school and to put in its place a concept of learning through experience, the concept of learning by engaging in activities that mean something to you, that you care about or identify with personal and social goals, in which you will collaborate with other learners

That’s what Dewey was saying a hundred years ago. But if we look at the events of the intervening time we see that, although Dewey’s writing and others who belong to what’s come to be known as "Progressive Education" or "Open Education" or "Child-Centered Education" have generated a lot of writing and talk in books, they have generated very little change in the education system. And why?

I think the two reasons that are most salient are the following. First, Dewey came to this problem with a philosophical argument, and I’m afraid that human society has never achieved that level of rationality where philosophical arguments will shift a social institution as deeply rooted as our school system is. We are now in a situation where we have something other than philosophical arguments. We have an army. It’s this army of children, of kids coming into the school with a better image of learning and with the technical knowledge to implement that better image of learning that provides bite, force, to the arguments which for Dewey were soft, without teeth and in the end ineffectual.

So that’s one difference and this is one aspect of child power--children as an intellectual power, as a political power exerting a force for ideas about education, that existed long before there were computers, long before there was technology. But the technology has put these children in a position where they’re able to each be a Dewey, to multiply Dewey by millions and so become a major force where Dewey alone was a weak read from this point of view, however strong he might have been intellectually.

There was another reason besides the lack of the force that could bring about change and this is the lack of a technological infrastructure. I’m fond of making little parables that illustrate points like this and I think I learned it from reading the Bible. One of these parables is making a comparison, which you mustn’t take very literally, with the history of aviation.

Leonardo da Vinci tried to invent an airplane. If you look at his drawings you see that he had some really good ideas, not that they would have worked. But I think if you look at his drawings you could see that if he had been able to experiment with those ideas, he would have seen the ways in which they didn’t work and very likely would have made an airplane or participated in the making of the airplane in his time. However, he could not even begin that process because in order to do it, you needed a lot of technological infrastructure. You needed machine tools, you needed fuels, you needed some source of power, you needed materials, you needed a knowledge of physics. It was just vastly more than any one person could produce, and so Dewey’s idea--well, a slip of the tongue, but I am identifying Dewey and Leonardo--Leonardo’s airplane remained a dream on paper as Dewey’s education reform remained a dream in the philosophy seminar.

I think that Dewey lacked a technological infrastructure in a way that I would like to illustrate by giving some examples of how information technology, how digital technology, can provide a kind of infrastructure for Dewey’s ideas that was not available until now.