Maybe controversial, but I first got internet access in 1999 as a 15-year old. And yes, that meant games, malware, and porn. But I did flourish, not despite all that, but also because of all that.

Games are now a rich part of our culture. They can tell great stories, and are not "better" or "worse" then a book per se. If you enjoy them in moderation, and go outside enough, games are a great thing. And LAN parties were a great pastime.

Malware, hacking tools, warez were one gateway for me into serious programming. I downloaded Visual Basic or Visual Studio and proceeded to write a trojan, to make friends' CD tray open and close on LAN parties.

And porn? Grown ups and parents don't like to hear it, but as a teen I of course enjoyed that there was porn on the internet. It didn't hurt me, and I've had healthy, normal relationships in my life.

> A minute fraction of kids will use the ability to install downloaded software to flourish.

...and a minute fraction will play on the football field or perform in the school theater.

and that's why we don't assign ballet shoes and football pads to every single student and instead have try-outs.

But some schools do mandate some form of athletic participation.

> The vast majority of children will just download games, malware, and porn.

They'll just use the browser for porn, no need to install third-party software.

For the vast majority of kids these machines are replacing textbooks, and aren't supposed to be tools for learning computer science. That said, you can also learn programming with nothing more than a browser.

And in the absence of computers (or any other tool to stimulate their curiosity; computers are just an excellent tool), the "special" (I hate that word) kids will just be miserable. If 90% of the kids who are given one of these computers squander them and 10% of kids use them to find an outlet for their curiosity, then it's worth it.

Unless you actively try to stimulate the smarter kids and give them something to sink their teeth into, it's extremely difficult to tell the difference between kids who are bored and miserable because the material is below their level and kids who just don't give a shit about learning. In both cases, they'll be goofing off, not paying attention, and possibly disrupting class, but one group can flourish under the right conditions, and the other group is a lost cause.

The games got me into coding- I had to know how it all worked.

Without games, there wouldn't have been any point to dig deeper than word processing.

Similar story. I learnt how to code because I wanted to become a hacker. Somewhere along the way... I learnt that it was far more satisfying [and legal] to actually make things rather than just break them.

I learned about batch files to enable extended memory in dos.

> The vast majority of children will just download games, malware, and porn.

Learning to avoid malware is an important skill for kids to learn. Shielding those kids will just create a bunch of adults that get infected.

It was cracking bootleg games that forced me to learn how to use hexadecimal editors, binary and computer programming. The skills I learned going off the approved curriculum are the same ones that actually pay my bills today. Hell if 13 year old me was exposed to computers today, I probably would never go past light user. Computers today have too smooth of a surface area. You actually need to be shown the curtain nowadays whereas before it was right in front of you and you needed to get past it to do anything useful

This is a great point. I work with exceptionally bright kids, so I push things like computer literacy and exploration, but for most Americans computers are simply tools. "With great power comes great responsibility."