We would face the dehumanization, nowadays the individualism that we foment with our educational systems to generate great conflicts both social and in our ecosystems. As they could transmit the social commitment said machines. It is really difficult or utopic to achieve that balance between knowledge and social commitment.

• Ana Bertha Carreón Flores

I'm with you @Steven 100% and so is our entire team. It's not only education in America. This is a global problem. The world is suffering because of our collective inability to make any profound systemic changes. The approach to schooling in K-University is more alike than it is different around the world and very slow to change if changing at all. The worldwide textbook and testing industries are also part of the story. I am working now mainly at the KG level where there is quite a bit of freedom to transform things in most places because there is usually no mandated curriculum or specific regulations on how it has to be organised. Frankly, a revolution is needed.

• Marjorie A. Henningsen

@ Marjorie, I completely agree that a learning environment that uses tech just for the sake of appearing cutting-edge is not helpfully in any way and may even be distracting. I think you asked many good questions about the future of education in America but I think we need to dig much deeper. I am personally in the camp that believes the whole structure of American primary education needs to be torn down and built from scratch. I hope more will join this camp. Our education system was designed a few decades before the civil war and although on the surface it seems different in 2017, it is very much the same. If we were to gather a team of the best minds in education and ask them to create a system having a primary objective to prepare American students to be competative on a global scale for the next century I believe they would come up with something radically different. I am not talking about just tech either. Tech would be an essential tool, but just a tool.

• Steven Polster

I would say that our current system by and large is a very costly venture that is most beneficial to a privileged few. I would also ask some of the same questions about current schooling--what guarantee is there that learning is taking place? There actually seems to be plenty of evidence that there's a lot of room for improvement. Why does the system have to be built around the needs of technophobes (and I say that being someone who is probably below average use of digital tech)? How do we currently deal with our many system glitches or compensate for them? It always somehow seems safer not to take a risk and make changes, but on the other hand, our reticence to do so for the past 100+ years (as rightly pointed out by Steven Polster above) has not exactly kept us safe. I would never advocate for the use of any technology for it's own sake, but if it could help me reach my pedagogical and learning goals, then I think why not give it a go?

• Marjorie A. Henningsen

While there are many views as to how future schools will operate in the digital age, I must say I forsee some limitations. How will we know for sure that the classroom will not become a game room? What gurantee is there that learning is taking place? How will these push button schools cater to the technophobias? How will system glitches be prevented or even compensated for? It seems to me a costly venture which will only be beneficial to a privilege few.

• Doreen Edwards

That's a real cool glimpse into the past's vision of the future of education. Much like the personal helicopter outside the window, our actual reality in the present isn't as good as the prediction in many ways. Although we have managed to achieve overcrowded classrooms, we haven't mastered the personalized, self-paced pedagogical environment to offset it. Despite our technology being leaps and bound beyond the vision depicted, our model of public education isn't dissimilar to the way education was managed in 1858' let alone 1958.

• Steven Polster