Excerpt from Access to Telecommunications Technology: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, Second Session, September 30, 1994 The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice at 9:45 a.m., in room 2123, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Edward J. Markey (chairman) presiding. Mr. Lehman [presiding]. The hearing will come to order. Chairman Markey will be along very shortly. He is detained at a breakfast downtown and is on his way here, but we will begin the hearing this morning without him. I am Congressman Lehman. The hearing this morning is on the education and access to telecommunications technology. I want to thank you all for coming and I want to thank Chairman Markey for holding this hearing on an issue that affects our Nation on the most basic level, the ability to properly prepare our young people for a rapidly changing world of information and commerce. There is much talk about the information superhighway and how the information revolution will affect our Nation's economic competitiveness. We usually discuss the information revolution in terms of maximizing worker productivity and improving the bottom line for business in the global economy. But there is one major sector in our Nation that is being left to scavenge back on the home front during the information revolution. That sector is education. Students cannot be adequately prepared for use of technology in the workplace if they are not educated with computers and other technology in the classroom. Being able to program the VCR, play video games, is simply not good enough. We as community leader, as policymakers and as concerned Americans, must take the lead in helping our schools take advantage of computers, telecommunications and other technologies to ensure that our children are eager to take on the world and its educational resources. We have seen remarkable changes in learning technology over the past quarter century, and yet technology has not transformed schools to the degree that it has transformed other aspects of our society. In fact, a teacher from the little red schoolhouse of the last century, could walk into many classrooms today and feel comfortable, because so little has changed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.