It's the education, stupid! (*)

The anecdote Christian tells is very enlightening:

Let me tell you a little anecdote: some time ago, a friend’s teenage daughter asked to use our family PC for a school assignment, since she didn’t have one at home.
Aware of that, I offered to show her how to use it, but the girl brushed off my offer by turning on the computer and launching Word, Firefox and ——— - surreptitiously - Messenger before I could even point her to them.
I went back to my own business, but soon I heard her calling from the next room. On my way over I smiled, wondering what had stopped her. Did she not know how to set up the printer? Had she lost track of the line spacing option?… nothing of the sort:
“Hey, Christian,” she asked me, with the document still blank, “how do you write an introduction?”…

Christian and I have had our differences on this subject, but he gets it, and I wish others got it just as clearly.

It’s not about giving computers to the kids with the best grades. I’ve already said that they’d be better off giving them a PlayStation.

That’s why Walter Bender and others left the OLPC project and founded Sugar Labs, because this problem gets solved with software, not hardware.

Yes, what the government did is a good thing, but we should demand that the state do more than charity, because this is about building an educational project! About teaching people to fish, not handing out fish.

You don’t need to teach Word. You need to teach how to write, you need to teach how to think. But then, thinking takes effort, and nobody goes in for that anymore.

(*) Note: the title is a reference to the famous phrase “it´s the economy, stupid!”