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Between the days of the ancient stylus and the advent of the steel-tipped pen of the industrial period, the quill and the hollow reed brought every major and minor piece of writing in Western civilization to life. I wish our kids could see that happening.

It might teach them a basic cultural truth they will never learn from Bill Gates or school administrators who cannot spend enough wiring our classrooms, often at the expense of hiring teachers.

Quality is in the mind, not the machine. Someday we may have a computer on every desk in every school, but that won't make us a nation of Shakespeares -- or Newtons or Chopins or Jane Austens or Thomas Jeffersons, all of whom scaled the heights of excellence without the benefit of Windows 98.

I'd like my students to ponder the fact that by the time they have located their style sheets and selected their fonts, Shakespeare was probably well into Act One, Scene One.

In the time they take to decode some inscrutable error message ("Invalid Signature -- Checksum Does Not Match"), Shakespeare might have been revising Mercutio's glorious Queen Mab speech.

In the time they spend rebooting and waiting for 20 drivers to load after their machines have locked up, he would very likely have been roughing out the balcony scene.

Not that I would want to see children struggling with quill and ink.

I can recall how I dreaded my penmanship classes, back in the days when schools still cared about handwriting.

The steel-nib pen may have been a breakthrough in the history of the written word, but it was a torment for me. Every careless upstroke left the newsprint paper my school supplied shredded and smeared. Before I got my first ballpoint in 1945 -- I remember the occasion: it was an Eversharp pen guaranteed to keep writing for 15 years! -- everything I wrote with pen and ink was an eyesore.

Now I am so habituated to Word Perfect (Version 6.1 for DOS, still the world's fastest word processor), I sometimes forget that in the throes of inspiration, any pencil will do.

And that is lesson No. 1 in computer literacy: the computer contributes nothing essential to the life of the mind. No, not even all the information that comes gushing out of the World Wide Web.

Remember, Shakespeare never needed to surf his way to www.traveleurope.net/verona.htm to write the play that made the city famous.

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