A common refrain heard among adults goes something like this: "My kids know so much about computers. Why, you'd just think they were born with a mouse and a joystick already attached." Unfortunately, what those parents don't realize is that this is a commentary on their own ignorance, not their children's familiarity with technology.
Generation Y, the children now in school and coming into college, are quite familiar with computers as devices to play games, videos, and CDs. But virtually none of them actually know how computers work. The next time you run into a parent who is proud of a child's computer savvy, ask the child to define HTTP, CGI, BIOS, or SCSI. Better yet, ask them to explain how these things work with, and within, a computer to get the results a user wants. If you're really brave, ask whether the child can type.
Yes, many children are quite familiar with computers: their hand-eye coordination is extraordinarily well developed. But we should as soon argue that someone's ability to make airplane noises qualifies them to be a pilot.
Ask a child of the "computer generation" to do some basic programming. With rare exception. all you'll get is a blank look. The irony is that the real "computer generation" is almost ready to collect Social Security. The real pioneers in the industry, people who still make money designing and (gasp!) building new computer systems are people whose educational careers began before Nintendo was a household word, and even before Nixon was impeached.
But ask a parent whether their child has critical reading and writing skills, and they will answer, most probably, that their child is about average. About average, you say? It may be stunning to realize that the same critical reading and writing skills necessary to diagram a sentence, or understand a written math problem, or to understand the anti-slavery message in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, are utterly indispensable when operating, or even trying to understand, a computer.