Even with the Net as it existed then, students of all kinds learned many shortcuts that enabled them to turn out better papers. The knowledge on the Net was far, far shallower on the whole than at, say, the Library of Congress in the States. But it may well have exceeded what the students could find in some small-town libraries. If nothing else, by logging onto the Net, they could learn how to stay up with the most current knowledge—no small edge in an era when new products replaced old ones in months rather than in years, and when academic journals proliferated. What about the authority question? That could diminish in time if schools of education shifted gears and encouraged teachers to foster curiosity rather than have students focus just on textbooks and teacher-certified facts. Would it happen in the United States without a concerted, TeleRead-style effort? Maybe. But I doubted this. If nothing else, public schools needed to give their teachers more time to master the hardware and the Internet so they would not feel so lost when their students roamed the Net; the equipment alone wasn’t enough. “Basic technology training is one of the most neglected aspects of educational reform,” said Andy Carvin, the Net-oriented educational expert at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “More often than not, when a school or a school district implements a major technology overhaul, teachers are introduced to the Internet and all of its tools in a day or two of ‘training.’” Carvin told me, and he was right, that teachers should enjoy regular use of the technology at home and at school so the knowledge wouldn’t fade away. Too, they needed to know how to “combine that knowledge with traditional teaching and curricula....It’s like learning to use a telephone—you can be taught to pick up the receiver and press a few numbers, but if you don’t have anyone else’s number or don’t know how to give out your own number it’s useless.” I asked Lorri Neilsen about Canada, and she said that schools of education up there were making good progress toward correcting deficiencies. They had better. In the new era of giant databases there should be more emphasis on finding _and_ evaluating information from many sources, and less on parroting textbooks. Teachers should encourage children to look for malarkey in all media, but especially on the Net, given all the self-publishing there. Perhaps with more women growing up with computers, female teachers in the future wouldn’t suffer so much from the old bugaboos about networks and smart, curious, uppity students. That still left another issue—the possibility that students might send offensive messages over the Net and perhaps fixate on its wilder areas such as the alt.sex series of newsgroups.