Social-media literacy

When Bill Gates visited Prague in Dec. 2001, a cartoon in HN pictured him scratching his head about how to get Czechs addicted to Windows. "It's like with all other drugs," he said in the cartoon. "Give children the first dose for free." During the visit, Microsoft announced a donation of K‹ 325m in operating systems to schools for connecting them to the internet. Fifteen years later, when current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella visited Prague this week, he spoke about the need to bring "computational thinking" to all schools. This basically means knowing when and how to meld human and machine intelligence. It's a useful skill, but allowing Microsoft to spearhead it is like allowing banks to oversee instruction in financial literacy, which inevitably leads to more irresponsible borrowing. What children in today's world need instead is impartial instruction in benefiting from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Snapchat, etc., without succumbing to them.