A few months ago, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu explained to a group of politicians and computer professionals how he wanted to provide a quarter-million of his country's toddlers with interconnected computers. Netanyahu was concerned because he had had trouble funding the project. I turned the tables and asked him why he wanted to do so in the first place. He was stunned, since it should have been obvious to anyone-especially to an MIT computer technologist-that computers are good for learning.

Throughout the world, droves of politicians, led by those in the United States, are repeating this fashionable mantra as they proclaim that millions of children in thousands of schools will soon be interconnected. You can feel their rush: "Isn't it so responsible and oh-so-modern to put an emerging technology to work toward the noblest of social goals: the education of our children?" Not quite.