That would have to be the updated chorus line for Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World for many of today’s kids.  Sure, they use the Internet “like all the time,” (sorry) but it is surprising to me how little many of them seem to know about its operation.

I am basing this on giving an evening class recently to a bunch young folks from the publishing industry and then yesterday spending some time with the teenage son of friends of ours (he is doing an internship with Susan at DailyLit).  All of them use the web extensively, whether it is Facebook or gmail.  Yet something as basic as understanding what a URL is and how the browser figures out which server to contact appeared to most as complete news.

Now to me that is a bit like driving a car and not knowing that it has an engine which burns the gasoline.  I am not suggesting someone needs to know all the details of DNS – I certainly don’t know exactly how our car’s carburetor does its job.  But it seems like a huge failure of the education system to me that you can apparently make it all the way through college (or middle school) without knowing that there is such a thing as DNS.  That is even more true given that it takes less than 5 minutes to explain the concept (start with “if you know someone’s name and want to find their telephone number”).

I am taking two things away from this.  First, in our own Internet tech echo chamber it is way easy to overstimate what the average site visitor knows about the net.  Second, I better spend a bit more time explaining this stuff to my own kids because assuming they will learn it in school seems like a bad idea.