The following quote was run Wednesday, March 19, 2003 in NewScan Daily, an online news service. It originally was part of a white paper on the use of computers in schools that Jef prepared for the Nueva school in Hillsborough, California:

There are many issues involved in designing a computer curriculum. I find the amount of trivia that must be mastered by each student (in fact, by each of us) in order to use a computer to be obscenely huge. Students become proud that they know where in the morass of menus and dialog boxes a certain control is to be found. They should be angry that they had to spend time learning the obscure, and that others are encumbered by having to deal with such issues. We should be teaching them to be sensitive to the havoc bad design wreaks on us. We teach history, but also add a moral component and do not hesitate to condemn racial and ethnic prejudice, the predation of dictators, and the use of force for solving differences. We teach science, and do not omit mentioning the important need to think about the consequences of new discoveries, and our responsibility to see that they are used ethically. When we teach "adding menu items, buttons, text input fields", we are only helping students add to the dismal state of computer use. Perhaps we should call it user abuse. We can try to justify this amoral stance by saying that we are teaching useful skills, but I am not convinced. We teach civility in daily personal interaction, we must teach it in computer interaction as well. (Jef Raskin)