Memorising facts, says Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital, is a waste of a schoolchild's time when every fact is now just a Google click away. Far smarter to teach children to think creatively, he says, enabling them to interpret the knowledge they can harvest online.

Sounds sensible, doesn't it? It's moving with the times; like switching on the central heating to get warm rather than digging up coal to light. Yet this suggests that there is a conflict between acquiring knowledge and thinking critically about it. There is none. One without the other is as useless as a cart that lacks a horse to pull it. As the philosopher Antonio Gramsci noted, when decrying the progressive educational thinking of his time, “previously pupils at least acquired a certain baggage of concrete facts. Now there will no longer be any baggage to put in order.”

Mr Gradgrind has given facts a bad name. Only a Luddite curses the computer as the educational tool of the Devil. But a computer gives the answer only to the question that it has been asked. A computer can solve a thousand equations in a second, but it cannot write Animal Farm, or compose The Magic Flute. If you could google the answers to The Times crossword, where would be the pleasure in it? It is the serendipity of blending knowledge, insight and imagination that gives learning its tang. Often we realise the value of facts only years after having learnt them, when they suddenly fit together like pieces of a jigsaw in a way that makes us shriek: “Eureka!”

No computer shrieks “Eureka!” Unless, of course, you have asked it: “What did Archimedes say after stepping into his bath and noticing that the water level had risen?” And that's a fact.