Read this opening paragraph: “Too many tweets! Twitter is over capacity. Please wait a moment and try again.”

Now try this: “If music be the food of love, play on: Give me excess of it, that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die.”

Which would your prefer your child to learn at primary school, the first line of Twitter or the first line of Twelfth Night?

It is being proposed that pupils will no longer have to study the Victorians or the Second World War - fair enough, they do that at secondary school. But instead, the Government wants them to learn about “social and collaborative communications, including e-mails, messages, blogs, wikis and twitters”, as part of the English curriculum.

You might as well give children lessons in switching off the television or putting on a DVD. IT communication for anyone under 18 is instinctive. They don't have to be taught about mobiles or computers - it's like learning to ride a bicycle, a few false starts and they're off.

My four-year-old could change my ringtone before he could read. By 6, children need a block on Google, by 8 they know how to get round it. They have to be restrained from spending their lives on Club Penguin, chatting for hours at the online disco and furnishing their own virtual igloos. By 11, they can locate Demi Moore's bikini-clad bottom on Twitter, destroy civilisations on Age of Empires and are scrutinising each other's Facebook pages. They click before they think.

When they get home from school they don't unwind with a little algebra or Antony and Cleopatra, they log on to buy Gogos on eBay or play Miniclip games. If they are desperate to do a bit of maths, they will hit Mathletics - they all know how to access Wikipedia.

Sir Jim Rose, who has been asked by the Government to update the primary curriculum appears to be convinced that children need to be taught technology as the fourth R alongside reading, writing and arithmetic. But schools should be teaching children skills and habits that they won't pick up at home - such as appreciating poetry, speaking a foreign language and learning a few facts so that they can query those Wikipedia entries. My six-year-old daughter knows how to find out everything about Hannah Montana online, but it was her teacher who suggested she might like to look up Darwin as well.

The problem with these proposals is that they have been written by the middle-aged who do find IT complicated and confusing and don't realise that tweeting will be obsolete by 2020, but Shakespeare won't. We are the generation that needs to learn to be computer-literate, not children.

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