For two decades computers have been touted as a new technology that will revitalise education. In the eighties they were proposed as tutors, tutees, and drillmasters, but none of those ideas seem to have taken hold. Now the latest proposal is that somehow the power of the World Wide Web will make possible a new approach to education for the 21st century. This paper proposes to translate Kierkegaard's account of the dangers and opportunities of what he called "The Press" into a critique of "The Internet" so as to raise the question: what contribution--for good or ill--can the World Wide Web, with its capacity to deliver vast amounts of information to users all over the world, make to educators trying to pass on knowledge and to develop skills in their students? It will then use Kierkegaard's three-stage answer to the problem of anonymity and lack of involvement posed by the press--his claim that to have a meaningful life the learner must pass through the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious spheres of existence--to suggest that only the first two stages--the aesthetic and the ethical--can be implemented with information technology, while the religious stage, which alone makes meaningful learning possible, is undermined rather than supported by the tendencies of the Net. (Contains 19 notes.)