Of course, this is true—but you’re leaving part of the story out. What we are interested in, what we need to learn, and what we want to learn more about is shaped by our interactions with our environments.
In Mindstorms, Seymour Papert discusses Mathland, a land where learning math is as easy and natural as learning French in France. In the US, thousands of middle schoolers attempt to learn French in school every year via formal instruction, and many of them find learning French difficult and rather unnatural. But as Papert points out, if those same students had been born in France, their experience would have been very different.
Even if an American middle schooler uses his or her own agency to choose to learn French and design the experience/program/curriculum around his or her own needs and desires, learning French in the US will never be the same as learning French in France. This is because the US lacks the cultural materials in the environment which makes learning French in France easy and natural. If those cultural materials are present, then we can develop the underlying intellectual structures needed to become fluent in French using what Papert describes as Piagetian learning. However, when those materials aren’t present, we don’t develop those underlying intellectual structures, so we are forced to rely on formal instruction instead. This is true regardless of how motivated you are or how much agency you have.
When I learned how to drive in the US, I took a driver’s education class in high school. But honestly, I could have learned to drive on my own without any formal instruction if you’d given me a car and track to practice driving on. This wasn’t simply because driving is easy and natural—it’s because I’d already learned 95% of what I needed to know to drive before ever sitting behind the wheel and putting a car into gear. I learned how to drive just by living in a world full of cars—and I learned it without any conscious intent. This is what Papert observed and described in Mindstorms: We engage in Piagetian learning, which is natural and easy, when the cultural materials we need to develop the necessary intellectual structures are present in the environment; we are forced to rely on formal instruction, which is difficult and damaging to our growth as learners, when those cultural materials are absent.
So, while your statement is true, it ignores the impact the environment has on what we choose to learn and whether or not we can engage in Piagetian learning, and it ignores the role we have as a culture in determining what is available in our environment. I’m not saying we should focus on technology, but I am saying we should pay attention to the cultural materials we add to the environment, and technology is part of that.
