ABSTRACT
This book is not an attempt to predict the future, and neither is it a comprehensive history of the use of computers in schools. Either of those tasks, the one foolhardy and the other daunting, would require a much greater number of words, a different author and probably a different readership. What this book does aim to do is to select from the history of technology in education, and particularly from the twenty years during which computers have become significant, in order to understand the present and to consider possible future developments. It draws in particular on some writing by advocates of alternatives to schooling, such as Ivan Illich, as well as some of those who have written on this area within an ICT framework, such as Seymour Papert. I am also indebted to those commentators, such as Sherry Turkle and Julian Sefton-Green, who have written about young people, computers and the Internet.
