This is a tough one to try to produce "through the keyhole" of this very non-WYSIWYG poorly thought through artifact of the WWW people not understanding what either the Internet or computer media are all about.
Let me just say that it's worth trying to understand what might be a "really good" balance between traditional oral culture learning and thinking, what literacy brings to the party, especially via mass media, and what the computer and pervasive networking should bring as real positive additions.
One way to assess what is going on now is partly a retreat from real literacy back to oral modes of communication and oral modes of thought (i.e. "texting" is really a transliteration of an oral utterance, not a literary form).
This is a disaster.
However, even autodidacts really need some oral discussions, and this is one reason to have a "school experience".
The question is balance. Fluent readers can read many times faster than oral transmissions, and there are many more resources at hand. This means in the 21st century that most people should be doing a lot of reading -- especially students (much much more reading than talking). Responsible adults, especially teachers and parents, should be making all out efforts to help this to happen.
For the last point, I'd recommend perusing Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking: Fast and Slow", and this will be a good basis for thinking about tradeoffs between actual interactions (whether with people or computers) and "pondering".
I think most people grow up missing their actual potential as thinkers because the environment they grow up in does not understand these issues and their tradeoffs....