The debate surrounding the introduction of computers into the schools raises a number of philosophical issues that themselves have nothing to do with computers.I take advantage of this situation to engage in a form of radical questioning, to examine certain prevalent notions and assumptions about what education is (or ought to be), about the relationship between teaching and learning, and most o fall, about what sort of human situation or social context enables full engagement with the world.

To lend a degree of immediacy and richness to this discussion, I describe and analyze, from an ethnographic perspective, a small free school in Copenhagen, Denmark—Friskolen 70—where I lived for eight months. I use this particular human community, which is a school more in name than in actuality, as an “object-to-think-with.” Through examining just what type of a place it is, we will some to terms with what such abstract concepts as “structure,” “authority,” and freedom” mean, as they relate to learning in the stream of life.