I have a few issues with this film.

I will begin with one of the debates that the film consciously raises: the debate between free inquiry projects and those students and parents feeling that not enough content is being transmitted. I actually think that this is a perfectly valid criticism. Consider the project where the kids learn about various civilizations, try to infer a pattern through which they rise and then collapse, then somehow try to represent these findings through a mechanism of wheels and gears. Alright, this seems to me to be a very good project to teach students lessons about things like planning, execution, perseverance, teamwork, etc. It is also an excellent project for learning technical and technological skills regarding how to design and make such contraptions, use the requisite technology, etc. But we could question how much the kids actually learn about ancient civilizations, anthropology, etc. I wonder whether this actually teaches any kind of critical thinking in these fields. The scholarly literature is bound to be full of questions like the ones the kids and tasked to answer, but I doubt they are digging into it much, or even learning about how such questions can or cannot be answered in these fields. The onus of the project really seems to be more on the technical side of the question. My criticism here is thus a larger one concerning multi-modal types of inquiry projects which allow kids to learn material in the way that seems best to them: some ideas, fields and topics are just better learnt using the traditional tools or reading, thinking, writing and speaking. Actually, I think that this is most disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. I think that this basic truth gets lost in the scramble to be innovative with technology and multi-modal approaches to pedagogy.

The other problem I have with the film is the way in which it fails to problematize the larger class structure of society and the way in which debates on educational reform are embedded in this. It is great to be critical of the traditional educational model, and to point out that it was developed in order to produce workers for industrial capitalism. We then point out how the economy has shifted to a knowledge economy and that we need to prepare kids to be future workers of this type. But are we simply in this case not replicating the same dynamic, where education is totally subservient to the economy and to the ruling class structure? The economy now needs workers of a different type and we rush to produce them. Is this what education really ought to be about? Simply creating ideal workers? What about teaching the skills that kids need to actually reflect critically on the nature of society and its problems? Is this not also one of the ideal goals of education?

The other issue is that it is great to give kids the skills to be able to work in the new economy; however, many educators seems to think that giving skills the silicon valley thinks they need will ensure that they can get decent work, like the way high school grads could be middle class decades ago because of the wealth of blue collar work available. But this ignores the fact that the demand for these types of workers is actually very small. And only a small percentage of people will land good jobs in the knowledge economy. These kids are likely to be underemployed regardless of the types of education which they receive because structural realities have changed. Moreover, this is the coding fallacy all over again: you can teach everyone to code because coders are in demand. However, if everyone knew how to code, then the value of this work would fall and it would no longer be a good job. The reality is that we live in a class society where only a small number of people not belonging to the capitalist class are able to have decent lives materially, and this number is declining all the time regardless of what educators do or do not do. Instead of solely trying to kids equipped for the fight for the smaller and smaller number of good positions, would it not be better to teach them to think critically about the society in which they live, so that they could understand its problems and seek to change them?

More on how the film ignores the larger class structure of society and how education interacts with this. These types of educational reforms privilege certain socio-economic classes over others, and furthers the neoliberalization of education. The school in the film is not a public school but a charter school. Though it claims to take in kids from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, you can bet that kids from wealthy families have a far easier time of it. Plus, from a labour perspective, these teachers have no union, and thus no job security of any kind. They are vulnerable to tremendous exploitation (self-exploitation) but the employer as a result of this.

All of these factors taken together make me extremely sceptical about the type of educational reform the film is trying to promote.