The next time you’re around a 12-year-old or a 14-year-old ask them what the underlying technology is behind Facebook or MySpace (relational database for starters). Ask them how a spammer gets hold of your email address (spiders and crawlers for one, contests and signups for another). Ask them to detect a phishing site in a lineup (could be anything from a misspelling to a wacky URL). My guess is that you’ll be surprised at how little the kids know about what’s going on behind the screens.That’s not to say that kids aren’t technologically facile. They are fearless button pressers and not timid about trying out new technology. They tend NOT to worry about what happens if the technology breaks since they typically aren’t the ones who pay for it. They tend not to care where they download music from as long as it’s free. And they’re at the stage in their development where act now, think later is the natural state.

Parents tend use the tech savvy kid as an excuse for remaining in the dark about the Internet. “The kids are the natives,” they say. “How could we possibly keep pace?”

Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor in sociology at Northwestern University, studied the technical fluency of an older crowd—college freshmen. Her results show that kids don’t know things from the simplest “what’s a blind cc in an email” to “what’s the definition of a podcast.”

When interviewed by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Hargittai said that adults assume that because kids have had access to technology they understand it. And that turns out not to be true.

Each day, it becomes more and more obvious that computer skills need to be taught, not learned on the street or through self-exploration, and should not to be confused with a propensity for button pressing.

For related reading: Joan Ganz Cooney Foundation.