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The iPad is a consumption device. Sure, you can use it for Web browsing, video-watching, or note-taking, but the laptop affords a much greater range of expressive possibilities. Apple’s embrace of digital textbooks reinforces a quaint view of education that transfers agency from learners to publishers. The tools for creating e-books, such as iBooks Author, require Macs, but the laptop cannot read the books it creates, forcing schools to choose between textbooks and computing. Apple has made it clear that education is about content delivery and testing, no longer about the power to be your best.

Tablets could have all the functionality of a laptop, but they don’t. Until they do, I recommend that schools invest in laptops for student use.

Jobs believes this was because sales and profits became the priority. When Jobs returned, he shifted the focus back to innovative products, and profits followed. [Could the analogy in education be focusing on test scores rather than on teaching and learning?]

A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

to make all of the politically unpopular choices that had been put off for decades

year after year, our schools have been run for the benefit of the adults in the system, not for the benefit of the kids.

first time someone dared to question an entrenched practice that had only served the interests of adults.

A similar phenomenon is occurring today in places such as Iran and Syria, where government officials seeking unvarnished news of the world beyond their borders use so-called proxy servers and circumvention technology to access their own Facebook or e-mail accounts -- platforms their governments regularly block.

comparing the uncertain dial tone of the fax machine with the speed of today's handheld devices is like comparing a ship's compass to the power of global positioning systems.

Historically, when the nation has a cold, schools sneeze. Examples are legion. When the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act (1958) aimed at getting better math and science teachers National problems of drug and alcohol abuse and tobacco smoking has led to states mandating courses to teach children and youth about the dangers of all of these substances. The Civil Rights movement in the 1950′s and 1960s’s spilled over the schools across the nation. Christian groups have pressured school boards to have prayer in schools, teach creationism, and vouchers (Educational Policy-2004-Lugg-169-87). The U.S. has competed economically with European and Asian countries for markets in the 1890s and since the 1980s. Each time that has occurred, business leaders turned to the schools to produce skilled graduates then for industrial jobs and now for an information-based economy.

This vulnerability to political stakeholders is very clear now with business and civic leaders pushing schools to be more efficient and effective in competing with China, Japan, and Germany.

In big cities where the problem of bad schooling is worst, results-driven reformers want mayors to take over schools and appoint their own superintendents, individuals who will accept no excuses from teachers and principals, will fight union rules, raise test scores, and create more charter schools.

The new way of thinking is that the point of school is to facilitate the transition from childhood to adulthood. That means designing schools based on research from the field of human development, not on research on how to raise test scores.

Academic content is important—it’s really important!—and it’s best learned by kids who are pursuing material that interests them, who are surrounded by adults they trust, who are intrinsically motivated to learn, who are mature and responsible, and who have a sense of autonomy over their education.

the first focus of school should be on creating an environment grounded in sound principles of human development. Academic learning then becomes a powerful by-product of that environment.

fair ways of assessing classroom effectiveness that include test scores but go far beyond these limited numbers. Such sane efforts, however, get forgotten in the wake of wave after wave of anti-teacher union tirades.

In doing so, they have narrowed the role of schools to being an arm of the economy reinforcing the fiction that all U.S. schools, not just urban ones, are lousy and that “effective” teachers and schools can solve poverty, put every kid into college, and end the skills gap with international competitors.

Have we reached the limits of our traditional school system's capacity to deal with the diversity of learners that come into our schools today?

To do this we need to shift our thinking from a goal that focuses on the delivery of something -- a primary education -- to a goal that is about empowering our young people to leverage their innate and natural curiosity to learn whatever and whenever they need to. The goal is about eliminating obstacles to the exercise of this right -- whether the obstacle is the structure and scheduling of the school day, the narrow divisions of subject, the arbitrary separation of learners by age, or others -- rather than supplying or rearranging resources. The shift is extremely powerful...

We can see an emerging crisis in our schools, while, on the other hand, we see a renaissance for learning. The question then simply becomes: would a completely different perspective that builds on the latter, be a more productive focus for us than the continued, largely unproductive, public debate around the former?