Encyclopedias are on disks that fit in your palm. Dictionaries are hidden behind tiny symbols on a laptop computer screen. John Dewy said that the way each of us wants our own child to learn is the way we should want all children to learn. Yet there is no part of our society that is more inherently unequal for children than education. A child's opportunities in education depend overwhelmingly on the accident of birth.
Children are the only true innocents.
In the promise of communications technology we now have a new chance to deliver on the obligation of creating equal opportunity. Networks in poor neighborhoods or rich suburbs equally deliver at lightning speed the learning of the Library of Congress. The dawning of the Information Age represents an opportunity for equality that we have not enjoyed since Horace Mann first championed the idea of the free public school. When I was teaching in that school I told you about it seemed to me that the only way for my students to succeed was to get out. The only way out was to go a magnet school, where the opportunities were so much greater than in my school.