I gave my six-year-old daughter an iPad as a birthday present in May. It quickly became an addiction to the extent that I have now drastically curtailed her unsupervised use of the device.
She took to it like a duck to water; navigating the device with very little instruction on my part.
It's not that there's anything unusual about her behaviour. Last year, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project dropped off closed boxes in two isolated rural Ethiopian villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each.
One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 3 300 metres; the other called Wolonchete, in the Great Rift Valley.
OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them. The boxes contained Motorola Xoom tablets and were taped shut with no instructions.
“I thought the kids would play with the boxes," Negroponte said. "Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up.
"Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android (the operating system).”
It's an interesting thought – what if we actually do not need teachers in order to learn how to read?
Let's assume that this is correct. What this then means is that countries that are increasing their access to the digital world for youth are likely to outpace the rest of civilisation.
(Yes, dear educators, I know that's a sweeping generalisation. It's called an educated guess. We use the technique often in the real world.)
This week, the Georgia Institute of Technology working with the International Telecommunications Union released the first study attempting to measure the world's "Digital Natives".
The term refers to those who are today between the ages of 15 and 24 and have been active online for the past five years.
The results are fascinating. Iceland tops the list with 13,9% of its population as digital natives followed by New Zealand (13,8), South Korea (13,5), Malaysia (13,4), Lithuania (13,2) and the United States (13,1).
But that's a breakdown based on total population. If one looks at what percentage of the 15-24 age group in any country can be called digital natives, South Korea wins hands down.
Some 99,6% of Koreans aged 15-24 are digital natives followed closely by Japan (99,5%), Netherlands (98,4) and Finland (98,3%).
(The reason why that figure is important is that these countries have a smaller number of 15-24-year-olds as an overall percentage of the population but almost all of them are connected.)
Which brings us to South Africa… Are we in the 90s? The 80s? The 70s?
An insignificant 18,6% of our adolescents and young adults in the 15-24 age group can call themselves digital natives. We are at position 111 out of 180 countries surveyed.
It's one of those statistics that makes me hang my head with embarrassment.
Now I know the ANC, which most of us have voted for over the past two decades, will trot out that old chestnut that this is a legacy of apartheid.
Actually, no. Hong Kong got their freedom from colonialism in 1997, three years after us. They have none of our mineral resources, none of our land resources. Hong Kong clocks in with 90,5% digital natives or number 21 in world rankings.
Zimbabwe does better than us with 25,1% digital natives placing them at 87 in world rankings.
Mauritius, the best run economy in SADC, clocks in with 42,3% at position 75.
In short, if you as a parent believe for a second that the people running our government are likely to be turning us into world competition in the knowledge economy anytime soon, think again.
Back to Negroponte who says: "If kids in Ethiopia learn to read without school, what does that say about kids in New York City who do not learn even with school?
"The message will be very simple: children can learn a great deal by themselves. More than we give them credit for. Curiosity is natural, and all kids have it unless it is whipped out of them, often by school. Making things, discovering things, and sharing things are keys.
"Having massive libraries of explicative material like modern-day encyclopedias or textbooks is fine. But such access may be much less significant than building a world in which ideas are shaped, discovered, and reinvented in the name of learning by doing and discovery."
So let's fire our dysfunctional teachers who struggle to produce a 30% pass mark for matric and replace them with iPads.
We can't possibly be worse off than we are now.