It's a Dad's Life: Apparently, if Enda Kenny has his way, both the elder and the younger will be trotting off to school in a few years with only laptops on their backs. If this happens I can only presume they will be picked up at the end of the day by their domestic robot and driven home in their Prius Mark III powered by a mixture of hydrogen and methane. They will get their dietary requirements via oral drops and will be sent to bed when their plug-in memory cards need to be recharged by their sleeping brains.

I think Kenny is being a tad ambitious. I suppose it's been a while since the last demand that we wake up and smell the technological coffee. The last urge to panic was that if we didn't get our kids wired up we would fall off the First World wagon and be living on crumbs from the more tech-savvy coming nations such as Vietnam and India.

Wasn't the PC supposed to kill the book in the 1970s? CD Roms were so much lighter and contained libraries of information in the 1980s. Sure, you could read the complete works of Yeats and Joyce in a day on the internet in the 1990s.

Yet, kids are still crawling off to school with their little limbs suffering from early-onset osteoporosis because of those Double Whopper size schoolbooks.

In a previous life I commissioned schoolbooks for one of the larger educational publishing companies. Back then we were concerned that books were on the way out despite consistent sales figures to the contrary. I researched what we could do to be ready for the sea-change. The answer? Spend millions of euro we didn't have on products we didn't think people wanted. As a result, even if every kid in the country was handed a skinny Dell in the morning, they would have next to nothing to look at that would match up with our syllabus.

I am no Luddite, technology is an integral part of my life. Yet I believe the most cost-effective, pragmatic and portable piece of hardware you can learn from is a book.

Political posturing is just warming up in advance of next year's election, but if we're going to have some sort of debate on education could it possibly be in the realms of the relevant? Why isn't the Opposition stirring the pot about the lack of synchronicity between childcare and primary schools as working parents struggle to cope with shipping kids from one to the other in the middle of the day? Why has there been no advancement in developing a variety of foreign language skills from the start of primary education? Have we become so important that we don't need to concern ourselves with those pesky Asian languages because soon ve vill rule ze vorld? Where are we going with our own national language - is it to be further marginalised or taken back to the core of the curriculum?

The elder has just started school and, in the short time she has been there, has stumbled across new realms of information. What worries me is that information is very similar to what I discovered about 30 years ago. But the world is very different now and Ireland's standing in it far more secure. Surely, we should be concentrating on the content of our education rather than the medium in which it is delivered so that we can maintain our new-found security into the future?

Besides, schoolbags are crucial to your social standing in class. You can't stick your ham sandwiches in a laptop, and your Mum will kill you if you Tippex the name of your favourite punk band all over it.