Over on Twitter Ravi Mohan describes computer programming classes in India where students memorize syntax and write out code by hand in notebooks instead of actually creating tools on computers. At first glance that sounds stunningly backwards, but in reading the pithy ebook Why School? by Will Richardson (@WillRich45), I pause for a second thought. The tools that are available to our young people at home and on their phones are dazzling, but our schools ignore or even forbid students from using some of the most powerful of them. Sure, everybody uses an online library catalog or Google, a word processor, maybe a graphing tool or something else to display data in striking ways. But the digital age is not primarily about quick, cool ways to grab and present data. At its best, it is about the most profound changes to literacy, to inquiry, to problem-solving, and to active citizenship. Using computers only to make pretty presentations in the United States in 2013 is not much better than writing computer code on sheets of notebook paper. Schools that stop there are hopelessly out of touch with the actual power of the technology. They might as well provide all their students with a sleek, massive, correcting IBM Selectric.