Paying attention

My first reaction was that I've seen the patterns mentioned before in other contexts. Kozol talks about poverty-level students with few resources in his book The Shame of the Nation. He's speaking there of the general level of deprivation suffered by these students but it's the same point Shelfe is making on a larger scale. The process of inheriting technological illiteracy is the same process that is referenced in inheriting poverty: the parents have little or no resources, so they cannot teach their children how to obtain or use those resources. Kozol also speaks of encouraging critical thinking in students.
I agree with Shelfe because the kind of critical thinking she describes encouraging on the topic of technology is the kind of critical thinking we should be encouraging on all topics. Neil Postman speaks of the disastrous effects the lack of this thinking about some technology, such as television, has had. In fact, he blames a shift in our thinking about childhood on this lack of thought. We just assume that new technology coming into our lives will, with some obvious exceptions, always have a positive effect on our lives. Those things that have no positive effect are still forgiven with the thought that they're a necessary evil. However, this isn't limited to thinking on technology. As a culture, we are often blindly optimistic about political policies and business practices, as was perfectly illustrated by the recent collapses in the financial industry.
This is why I feel that students must be taught to ask hard questions about everything. In our nation, we spend 18 years telling children they can't handle decisions. Then we drop almost all those decisions on them at once. Don't we break faith with them if we do not give teach them how to gather the information to make those decisions?
EDIT: Caught a few spelling errors and corrected them. Make your own joke about the irony of an English Ed. grad student missing a spelling error in a post titled "Paying Attention"...