As opposed to before where they were trained to follow instructions from a book or from a teacher? Also the dogma around "the humanities" is so bullshit it's barely funny anymore. Go train more dictators or whatever.

Teachers are opinionated, as are books. And they all are a checks and balances between them and administration. Admins make sure there's a core curriculum driven by the proper literature. Teachers work off that base to teach and offer their own personality with it. Books tend to be a neutral ground to pull on making any given person too opinionated.

Sure, they admin or government can ban a book or fire a teacher, but that takes energy and time.

Automating all that to have the administration tweak lesson plans to their will sounds like a cliche dystopian sci-fi plot. Oh how little I knew.

Holy crap, quite bit of extrapolations in your comment.

>trained to be unable to function without a computer.

Where is this from? The article mentions a lot of issues with alpha school, but the implication that kids are glued to screens and are "unable to function without a computer" isn't one of them. There's the issue that finishing random ed-tech games don't prepare you for the real world, but I don't really see how that's different than the perennial complaint that the US education fails to prepare kids for the real world (eg. "school taught me that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell but not how to do my taxes")

>Let me guess that they are also exposed to hundreds of trolley problems so that they can make "difficult decisions" later.

???

>Probably not exposed to humanities or arts so as not to weaken their utility as tech goons.

See the review linked in my other comment. It might not be an unbiased account, but I'm reasonably confident that the average student there gets more exposure to "humanities or arts" and other extracurriculars, than the average public school student, who maybe gets a field trip to the science center once a year.

To use your example... Taxes are easy for the vast majority of people (claim the correct number of dependents, take the standard deduction, and you're done). For the rest of us, there are CPAs willing to do them for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

I say this as somebody who had to navigate the AMT rules for years in my 30s and hasn't used the standard deduction since college. In no way would I expect a high school to teach me personal tax law at the expense of a basic understanding of biology or literature.