The report makes the following points:

• "Most parents encourage boys' mechanical inclinations and girls' domestic ones.

• In school, girls - at the age of 10, when school options start to become available, - receive less encouragement than boys to take math and science courses.

• Role models for girls are rarely scientists.

• Girls are seldom guided towards technical apprentice programs

• Girls are frequently unaware of scientific and technical job opportunities.

• The mass media do little to change these patterns."

For all the talk about computers, educators are doing a poor job of informing the public about the questions which must be dealt with. Louis T. Rader, professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia, has three questions for those who make school board decisions:

"First, what is meant by 'computer literacy,' which in practical terms might be put this way: 'What should a high school graduate know about computers' or better still, what should a high school graduate be able to do with computers? Merely reading about computers or hearing about them from the teacher does not make our students literate in computers, any more than reading about numbers would make students mathematically literate.

My second question is whether 'computer literacy' is considered by the school administrators to be at the same level of need for students as reading, writing and math. And why not? Computer literacy is now a basic skill of such great dimensions that every graduate requires it. Dr. Donald Michael of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions wrote twenty years ago that 'ignorance of computers will render people as functionally illiterate as ignorance of reading, writing, and arithmetic.'

The third question is whether our teachers are trained in the use of the computers or at least familiar with them and appreciate their potential. Certainly computer literacy for teachers must precede computer literacy for the students, at least until the software makes the teachers' role more to assist the learning process than to teach as in the past."

On this last point, Professor Rader warns of two dangers: the ability of teachers to resist and undermine a system of change which they are not a part of; and the danger of "the unfortunate combination of sophisticated machines and unsophisticated buyers."

These two points are extremely important in Manitoba. As you know, the Pawley Government is a new administration, still within its first year. But very quickly it became evident that major issues had simply been ignored or put aside by the previous government. One area was computers in schools. Therefore, in March, Education Minister Hemphill named a committee to look at the subject of school computers. Mrs. Hemphill, did not want to put - as Professor Rader cautions - "sophisticated machines and unsophisticated buyers" together.

The committee's report has not yet been made public, but I have the Minister's permission to tell you that the committee decided quite easily that, if computers are to be seen as technical aids, there is no problem. There has always been a place for such aids in education, and teachers have adapted to them readily. Unfortunately, computers, while they can be used at the minor level of technical aid for a short period of time, quickly challenge teachers and students into wider and more sophisticated use.

There is a strong evidence in Manitoba schools that we have gone well past the technical aid stage. Already, 15 per cent of Manitoba schools own their own computers, and another 20 per cent intend to do so by the end of the year. In addition, many school divisions have high-school programs making use of a link to a central computer system in Winnipeg.