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Trusting teachers too much also has its perils. For every good teacher who is too creative to survive in the era of “no child left behind,” there’s probably another tenacious, horrid teacher who might be dethroned only because of unquestionably bad outcomes on objective tests.

Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point.

The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgment of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd.

The crucial choice of which intergenerational information is to be treated as computational grist is usually not made by educators or curriculum developers but by young engineers.

Some of the top digital designs of the moment, both in school and in the rest of life, embed the underlying message that we understand the brain and its workings. That is false. We don’t know how information is represented in the brain. We don’t know how reason is accomplished by neurons. There are some vaguely cool ideas floating around, and we might know a lot more about these things any moment now, but at this moment, we don’t.

We are tempted by the demons of commercial and professional ambition to pretend we know more than we do.

We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen.

What is really lost when this happens is the self-invention of a human brain. If students don’t learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good.

it might now lull us into hypnotic complacency.

"Is it possible to be quoted shrugging my shoulders?" asks Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich when Fox News requested the company's comment on Cleland's book. "Everyone knows that Mr. Cleland stopped being a neutral analyst years ago and is now paid by Microsoft and AT&T to criticize Google full-time."

is a consultant to some of Google's competitors, including Microsoft and AT&T.

Cleland refused to confirm it or reveal the names of any of his clients

"What happens is that Google is the company that most successfully takes advantage of the Internet," says Levy, who does caution that "there's a real concern because they do have a lot of information about us, and I think Google should be as transparent as possible. In most cases, I think they are pretty transparent about what they have on you and how it works."

On Tuesday, South Korean authorities reportedly raided that country's Google offices to investigate if the company "has been illegally collecting private data."

"I don't think there's ever been a U.S. corporation that has had so much control," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in Washington, D.C., who also teaches Internet privacy law at Georgetown. "It would be like a company producing automobiles, providing oil, and building the highways ... We're in a similar situation today with the Internet and Google."

"Any company with the power of Google has to be watched," says Levy. "But I don’t think Google is a company which is intending to take over the world in some sort of negative sense." But Cleland's version of Google argues that it does. "Google says overtly that they want to change the world," Cleland says, warning that "Google is leading us towards a collectivist society, a planned economy and one world government." "The more you learn about Google, the more troubled you will become."