Many believe that school is the best environment for children to learn. They may admit that some of the methods used at school are a bit archaic, that society in future will demand new skills, such as 'computer-Literacy'. They believe that by introducing computers into schools, complete with Local Area Networks and access to the Internet, children will obtain this new 'literacy'. Few realise that instead of literacy, one should speak of a new 'fluency' that is required. School has many bad aspects, resulting from the large number of pupils put together in one classroom, the fixed times and subjects, the age-grouping, the fact that school is compulsory and controlled by the Government, etc, etc.
Parents can combine learning from and practice in real-life situations with pleasure.
School teaches the 3 'R's, under the pretence that literacy and numeracy are now the most important skills and that apprenticeship is too authoritarian and has a too narrow focus. In the old days, when most people worked on the land or knew only one trade, teachers were respected for their knowledge. Today, facts are in books and many parents have more academic background than teachers. Whatever the method used, the big problem lies in school as an institution. Teachers see the Internet as a gigantic library that holds vast amounts of facts and lmowledge, stored as huge files of text, all to be accessed by means of character input.