Seymour Papert, who holds the Lego Chair for Learning Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looks back over a decade during which American schools acquired more than three million computers and assesses progress and resistance to progress. Stories about visionary teachers who have used computers to enrich learning provide a glimpse of this potential, but school as an institution has resisted. Technology should not be an add-on to a preconceived system of education. The book is particularly critical of the schools' way of isolating the computer in a separate room where computer literacy becomes just another subject or using computer-aided instruction as a new technology for teaching the same old curriculum. In the proposed vision, the computer will be as much part of all learning as the pencil and the book have been in the past. With the new computer-based media, children will master areas of knowledge that are now inaccessible. Self-directed work will allow an unprecedented diversity of learning styles and opportunity for students to learn to take charge of their own learning. (Contains 16 references.) (KRN)