Elementary Schools and the Internet:

Introduction: Equating 'Literacy' and The Internet

There are any number of inherent questions that come to mind when attempting to make an assessment of the Internet's given or potential impact in combating illiteracy in the elementary educational system. These questions are further compounded when the equation must factor in the average intelligence of schoolchildren somewhere between the first and eighth grades.

To begin with, such children are - by standards set forth by the U. S. Office of Education for children with less than six years of schooling - considered to be functionally illiterate. The given "job" of the school system is to make them, at least by the end of the eighth grade, literate citizens of the new economic and information age, capable of reading and writing at certain predetermined levels of competence.

A second consideration is whether or not the Internet, in itself, is defining new and lasting benchmarks for the very concept of literacy. Already we are seeing the acceptable standards by which one can be accredited as being "computer literate." Extending that definition by taking it off the desktop hardware/software arena and throwing it out into the ever-expanding flux of what is called "the Internet" presents newer and more challenging definitions of what is currently called "Internet savvy."

Further complicating our analysis is the impact of such computer