I feel like he's right on. No denying that growing up in US schools is a bad experience for a lot of people. After teaching for six years and developing ed-tech

I feel like he's right on. No denying that growing up in US schools is a bad experience for a lot of people. After teaching for six years and developing ed-tech for two, I thought the most effective path would be doing a PhD, which is where I'm now. A few quick terms and ideas for how these are being pursued today in the world of education... I'd love to hear other folks' thoughts on this too. We have such a deep tradition of idealistic, socially-engaged computer scientists imagining new technical and social futures. 1. "Stay in the class where you belong." [1] persuasively makes the case that there's not a pedagogical justification for tracking and offers strategies for enacting change. But it's a political issue; we're still in the aftermath of Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), which contributed to white flight and setting up separately-funded school districts. Integration through busing, etc. led to schools which were integrated on paper, but were segregated internally with tracking. There are a couple of pretty powerful This American Life episodes on the issue [2]. 2, 3, and 4: ("Turn on and off like a light switch," "surrender your will to a predestined chain of command," "I determine what curriculum you will study") feel related. There are awesome school models focused on connected learning [2], project-based learning, constructionism. I don't know of a successful strategy for scaling these in the US, though Ole Iverson [3] leads some really exciting work integrating design into the curriculum at all levels in Denmark. The Summit schools seem to have decided to focus more on scaling than on answering the critiques in 2, 3, 4; they're partnered with Facebook to develop an online school platform. We'll see. 5, 6: ("your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth," "I teach children that they are being watched.") also go together. I've suggested [4] here before; it's a Foucault-inspired analysis of how states exert power by insisting on legibility. For schools, this means centralized accountability. There's a new spin on this with learning analytics; [5] is an ethnography of the quantified self, exploring how things like fitness trackers become authoritative inner voices shaping our phenomenological experiences. Definitely a design consideration to keep in mind. I think there are strategic opportunities in the move to make CS a core part of the primary and secondary curriculum. One strand of this is developing critical computational literacies--undertanding the ways tech mediates our everyday experiences, imagining and enacting alternatives. Everything that's been said about (textual) literacy as a foundation for a participatory civic society increasingly applies to computation as well. [1] Burris, C. C., & Garrity, D. T. (2008). Detracking for excellence and equity. ASCD. [2] Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., ... & Watkins, S. C. (2013). Connected learning: An agenda for research and design. BookBaby. [3] http://www.engagingexperience.dk/ http://www.engagingexperience.dk/ [4] Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press. [5] Dudhwala, F. (2017). Doing the self: an ethnographic analysis of the quantified self (Doctoral dissertation).