Books. Even in the USA, classrooms are starved of just
books. Not to mention the third world.
Okay, if it has to be some gee-whiz techno-thingy, then a Kindle which is about as cheap as an iPod shuffle. Which reads aloud and can automatically adjust to your reading level, suggesting new books as you go.
I think we need to look at some new economic models for teaching. Maybe a school could simply garnish 5% of every dollar a student makes above, say, 75% of the median wage, for 10 years. That gives the school some guaranteed income and the incentive to teach students economically useful skills, quickly.
Also, new reasons to learn and new ways to learn.
The main problem with educational software today is that the administration buys it and it serves their purposes, not the students'. This is an exactly analogous situation with corporate IT software buying. Except it's even worse because the administration is a quasi-branch of the government.
Out with the state curriculum and the bureaucrats. In with selling education to the people being educated. Education for its own sake. If that means we develop a course in rap lyrics, we'll give you rap lyrics. But we'll also discuss the history of martial poetry too, from the Greeks onwards. We're also going to discuss rhetoric, the mathematics of periodicity, rhythm, and the Nyquist theorem of sampling. If you want to learn how to read the Bible better, we'll do that too, and that way we can bring in practically everything in English literature after the King James Version.
Graduating from a grade should be like getting a belt in martial arts. Something you do at your own pace and a test you take at your own initiative (with parental prompting too). The difference between slow students and fast students is usually something like 33-50%. So if someone needs two years to master algebra, let them TAKE two years. It's not a race for fuck's sake.
Education should be interwoven with doing actually useful things. I think pg is right on the money that kids are mainly disconnected from society because we go to great lengths to disconnect them. Drug dealers know that at least some 14-year-olds can be trusted with limited responsibilities; so would it really be so terrible to have kids doing some jobs in a more positive working environment?
Let's put education in unusual places, with the people who need it and are motivated to learn. Undocumented workers are where I would start. We already know these people are ambitious, hardworking, and habituated to risk.