I appreciate your reply, as you clearly have more experience than me with this topic, but bear with me if I push back on some of your points.
> Wikipedia is a tiny part of the picture; we also have YouTube (with millions of creators from all cultures/languages/fields), Khan Academy, the Internet Archive, your local library, and countless other resources
That's precisely my point. YouTube is audiovisual, something we've had since the dawn of television. Sure, the content has exploded in diversity (which has its own problems of curation), but it's still a fundamentally consumption based, one way, zero interaction, learning experience.
Khan Academy and other MOOCs are also audiovisual and text based, and at best, have communication capabilities with the instructor and other students. This is attempting to bring the traditional school experience to the virtual world, and is hardly revolutionary.
The Internet Archive, while vast in content, is still only audiovisual, and has the same consumption and curation problems.
If we settle for computers being a mere portal to traditional resources, then, yes, there is vast knowledge to be acquired. And this has been invaluable for many people, myself included.
But computers are capable of so much more if we step outside the boundaries of traditional teaching. They allow content to be interactive, linked, remixed and experimented with in ways that weren't possible before. For the developing mind of a child, this allows entirely new ways of making knowledge accessible and entertaining. Sure, there have been many attempts at this, and the edtech sector is huge, but none of this is fundamental to how computers are used. At the end of the day, most children will be more drawn to endless media consumption than an educational app, and our OSs are optimized for the former rather than the latter.
It's difficult to imagine what such a system could look like today, or the repercussions it could have on education, but I find Alan Kay's ideas very visionary in this sense.
> Ultimately, software doesn't really matter for education. What matters is that kids have a physically safe (heated/cooled, with access to food, clean restrooms, etc) facility, and are under the guidance of teachers who are in an environment conducive to quality teaching
Sure, this is the traditional school environment. While that certainly helps, and it's a crime that teachers are so underappreciated and underpaid, that system is broken in many ways. From uninspired teachers that fail to raise interest in learning, via teaching practices that encourage memorization of concepts rather than curiosity and experimentation, to the idea that everyone learns the same way or at the same pace, to corruption, bullying, and the list goes on and on.
We have the technology to revolutionize every aspect of our lives, yet when it comes to education, we're still relying on traditional methods. So I disagree that software doesn't really matter. All the software _attempts_ we've had so far haven't made a breakthrough, but the potential is there.
As examples of the good kind of software, take a look at the articles by Bartosz Ciechanowski[1]. Or in a more commercial sense, brilliant.org. These are isolated examples of what computers can do, but imagine if the same operating system you're reading this on fundamentally worked in a different way, to allow free-form experimentation with concepts in ways we've never seen before. Then imagine that system connected to the modern internet, where billions of people are doing the same thing, and what that interaction could mean for developing new ideas. This goes beyond simple screen and document sharing that we find sophisticated today. And, in many ways, it's unimaginable precisely because it's so far from what we can do today.
[1]: https://ciechanow.ski/