This book is incredibly annoying. For all the times they say that educators are involved, one educator is involved twice and another two (maybe three) people who have actually been in educational facilities exist.

Mostly, this is a book for non-education professionals BY non-education professionals. I'm not against this on principle, but I find it condescending to assume that people who really aren't in schools on a regular basis have any real knowledge about problems IN schools. Teachers should've been centered more often than they were.

Robots, on the other hand, should've bee LESS centered.

Here's a run-down of a longer review I did elsewhere:

This book likes to pretend that it has a lot of different goals and topics to discuss, but it doesn’t. It starts off claiming that we are “implementing ‘strict discipline procedures’” but then complaining about how we won’t let children have gum in the classroom (because many students put it under desks and chairs, and that’s kind of unhygienic) or how we won’t let them use their phones as calculators (but forgets to consider either distraction or cheating).

But ignoring the silly complaints about so-called strict discipline (while they ignore genuine examples of over-the-top discipline, particularly against children of colour), their main premises seem to be:

• We need to be training children for the workforce, and we need to make sure that they are capable of working with an “always innovating world.”
• We are not preparing our children for the workforce properly, and many companies do not like their “lack of skills.”
• We need to figure out what the purpose of education is because no one seems to know anymore.
• We are going to be dominated by automation and artificial intelligence (AI).
• Education policy is “too ideological.”

All of these ignore the realities in which we live. Teachers are told to prepare students for "jobs of the future," but no one knows what these jobs are beyond speculation; we're told to prepare students with the skills they need, but the skills we know they will need are the ones discouraged the most (critical and creative thinking, analysis, transfer).

It pretends that any policy will be apolitical, and that's not possible. Anything dictated by policy is inherently political, and politics inherently have an ideology supporting them. These are the classic white people wanting an apolitical world but not realising that being apolitical is a political stance (one that ignores the world).