"When you visit a third grade or fourth grade, a fifth grade classroom and you see young women, girls, excited to be working with the computer, you see them trying the give and take associative, tinkering around kind of way to work with their first programs. And I called that style of working with computers "soft mastery" and contrasted it with the "hard mastery" of the kind of engineer-style structured programming. And you see their wrists being slapped by a teacher who's telling them, 'That's not the right way, do it this way. Make an outline. Check it twice. ' And then they walk away feeling well, they don't know how to do this kind of thing. This isn't fun for them. It isn't interesting. It's not their thing. I believe that those girls are being lost for many years to the technical culture. To the computer culture."
-- Sherry Turkle
