Re: All the world's knowledge
You are assuming here that all children are the same.
I had always been interested in computers, and myself had Encarta on my first PC, a Windows 95 machine, which, as mentioned by someone else cost my parents a fair bit to buy for me. There was a feature in Encarta to connect to the internet, but it was always too expensive, so I spent hours reading through articles on Encarta, watching the video samples, etc. I always knew about this 'internet thing' but never actually got access to it until a few years down the line.
When internet became affordable, and my dad got us on AOL, my learning only increased. I became more fascinated with how it all worked 'under the hood', and I remember the first thing I did was find out how web pages were put together, viewing the source of pages, studying the HTML underneath and playing around with stupid pages that were full of horrible little JavaScript games :)
The fact that I'm a Software Developer these days probably isn't surprising. The medium in which I accessed this information (the 'net) is also not very surprising; I didn't spend hours in libraries, but the moment I got access to the internet, I saw it to be what it really was; an electronic library full of information with easy to use index systems (search engines). The technology behind it admittedly interested me more, but either way.
I was never spurred on by teachers to follow down this path, and in fact had teachers telling me that 'computers' and 'the internet' were 'just a fad'. I remember in secondary school being referred to numerous "careers officers" concerned with the fact that I had such an interest in technology.
My journey of learning was mostly a lone one; certainly, at least, the things that I know now and keep me employed in a reasonable job were learnt by myself through my own desire to just know how they work. This is still the case to this day. Secondary school teaching was abysmal, come to think of it: copying down passages of text into our own books which was written onto a blackboard by a teacher. We weren't even allowed to go near a computer, despite the school having a small Windows 3.11 network. The room was just locked up and never used. And this was about 15 years ago now.
To summarise, not all kids are the same. Some children, given a portal to vast amounts of information -will- just absorb it. Some will just not be interested in the slightest and would rather kick a football around outside, or consume Facebook on a smart phone, not caring how it works or how it's put together.