Socrates was afraid that being able to write things down and read them later would dumb down the whole process and make people mentally lazy. Socrates lost, of course, and reading and writing won the day. They fought the introduction of textbooks into the schools. But they too lost. And so here we are today doing it all over again.
Children enter the world seeing, smelling, touching, hearing, talking.
Under normal circumstances, these kids would be dumbed down to the normal mono-mediate literacy level that characterizes most adults in our society. Computers and television in general and the Internet in particular are threatening this status quo. These electronic devices are corrupting the youth of this generation. It is just that I don't know any parents who do that. Their minds are working too fast absorbing their environments and they cannot be bothered with spending too much time on one task.