The piece ends with the following quote:<p>&gt;<i>&quot;People are... asking: ‘What do we need to do to save traditional public schools?’&quot;</i><p>And for the life of me, I cannot understand why people should be interested in saving &#x27;traditional public schools&#x27;(TPS).  I know that TPSs are a stand-in for a number of political values, but I have to say that emphasizing political values and the status quo is quite disappointing when it comes to the development of childrens&#x27; potential.  In an age of rapidly improving communications, with responsive websites and machine learning, as well as the massive budgets devoted to &#x27;education&#x27;, we should be able to do better than small incremental improvements to a model of schooling developed hundreds of years ago.<p>Perhaps this article is a symptom of Thiel&#x27;s diagnosis in &quot;Zero to One&quot;, that people do not believe that things can be drastically improved, so they rely on incrementalism and a refusal to believe in anything specific.  Another possibility is that the author is simply trying to defend the status quo against change, and appealing to cynicism and doubt to achieve this ends.  I am not sure which possibility I find more distressing.