Modernizing Education

As a follow up to the above video on Changing Education Paradigms, I'd like to quote almost the entire comment left by Michael Reynolds on James Joyner's Outside the Beltway Blog :

The very last things we should be doing are more testing, applying more pressure, depriving kids of sleep, politicizing curricula, attempting to shut the computer out of the school. Virtually everything we’re doing is wrong. And every way we’re trying to “reform” actually makes the situation worse.
I’ve been on book tour which involves me going to two or three schools a day. And I have kids of my own — 13 and 10. The 13 year-old is home schooled because I couldn’t bear to watch his mind be hobbled by “education.” My 10 year-old is in a small private school only a bit larger than a one room school house, and only there at all because she’s a kid who needs to be surrounded by other kids.
When I talk at elementary schools I warn the kids that adults will attempt to destroy their capacity to imagine. In middle schools I tell the kids to ignore well-meaning efforts to turn them away from books they enjoy and push them onto books they despise but that are “good for them.” And I always point out that while my work day averages maybe 4 hours, theirs runs more like 10 hours.
Lately I have begun asking teachers not to “shush” the kids, to let them respond to what I’m showing them. It’s as if, in some schools, they fear the laughter of children.
I am more and more of the opinion that school is a form of child abuse. Let the kids sleep, let them play, offer them opportunities and enticements and amusements not tests and work sheets.
And I would suggest that if there is one group in the educational system that should be asked to plan reforms it is not administrators or teachers (and sure as hell not politicians or ambitious parents) but the school librarians.