WILLIAM CROSSMAN - From the Three Rs to the Four Cs:

The battle against nonliteracy has focused on teaching everyone to read and write text. But new technologies that facilitate more holistic learning styles, engaging all of the learner’s senses, may open the locked stores of global knowledge for all. Instead of reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic, we’ll move to critical thinking, creative thinking, “compspeak,” and calculators.From the moment that a child was born, her brain, central nervous system, and all of her senses shifted into high gear to access and to try to understand the incredible new informational environment that surrounded her. She had to make sense of new sights, sounds, tastes, smells, tactile experiences, and even new body positions.Jessica approached her new world with all of her senses operating together at peak performance as she tried to make sense of it all. Her new reality was dynamic, constantly changing from millisecond to millisecond, and she immediately and instinctively began to interact with the new information that poured through her senses.Jessica’s cognitive ability to access new information interactively, and to use all of her senses at once to optimize her perception of that ever-changing information. She was innately, biogenetically hardwired to access information in this way.For Jessica’s first four or five years, her all-sensory, interactive cognitive skills blossomed with amazing rapidity. Because each learning experience was all-sensory, her perception of reality was truly holistic.  She also became proficient in using the variety of information technologies (ITs) that continued to be introduced into her environment:  She was also feeling very good about he