I had linked a relevant post, but html comments aren’t allowed. Here’s a piece from USA Today you’re probably familiar with. Read this before you read the next paragraph.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/12/our-gold-star-w.html

How students develop in the classroom will profoundly affect how they perform in the workplace, and we do our students a disservice by changing how classrooms work until the workplace — not the outside world — changes along with it.

http://awaitingtenure.wordpress.com/

As for digiracy, this is a heavily undervalued skill in K12 education. Our students will not work in information economy jobs that do not include access to the Internet as a tool. Why do we still pretend that knowing the right answer in a narrow range of topics (punctuation and grammar, spelling, social sciences dates and names, maths, and science facts and trivia) is a more valuable skill than being able to FIND the right answers on a broad range of topics?

The teacher if not the giver of knowledge then has to help bring out the connections and help the students see how events, philosophy, culture are all related. This means a different approach. If teachers don’t like being ignored they will find irrelevancy even worse.

I don’t mind challenging the status quo, staring ourselves in the face realistically, or questioning our methods, but it seems that we are really promoting conversation after conversation that basically says little more than, “we don’t like school.” “If only we could spend all day on the computer, we’d be so much happier and better consumers, learners, and people. Why can’t we just do that?”
Sorry, in a game of “buyers” on the topic, I’m selling.

My viewpoint is also different than thinking we incarcerate “the listless, bored, apathetic students that are prevalent in all too many of today’s high school classrooms.” Being in and around the educators of today, I think we can be proud of the challenges laid before students in a supportive environment, which encourages them to continue to learn (Scott also has a nice post on this under Mini-Golf and Learning).

Basic math – elementary school.
Basic grammar and spelling – elementary school.
Basic computer skills – elementary school.
So that’s a pretty good argument for the utility of elementary school. Now how about, say, past the 5th grade?

“All day on the computer”…funny how you say it as if that’s somehow more claustrophobic than eight hours a day treated like a prisoner with most of the time wasted in a typical school setting. For the record, I think that technology CAN be a “magic schoolbus”, taking kids to places they would otherwise not be able to go, interacting with people who would not likely visit their school. Even better, it can be used to individualize instruction so the teacher can be the helper and guide rather than the enforcer and the Source.

How about we spend part of the learning day meeting standards (at our own pace), part in free exploration (perhaps under the guidance of a mentor), and then part of the day playing, reading, engaging with peers and adults and learning the way humans are programmed to do? What exactly is the goal of formal schooling again, and how we doin’?

I had a longer screed here but lemme just say instead that metaphors from the school system to the penal system kinda leave me with a dry mouth and a bored stance. C’mon, School 2.0. C’mon c’mon c’mon.

[and if either of you say no then you're either liars or you're in some of the most exceptional secondary schools in the country]

I keep waiting for the rhetorical balance around the edtechnoblogosphere to tip in favor of bottom-up solutions, the kind that will make an impression on your teacher-as-warden. C’mon, School 2.0. C’mon c’mon c’mon.

Are our students intellectually constrained and restricted in class? Absolutely. Has it always been this way. Yes, in most classrooms. Are many (most?) secondary students bored at least half the time in school? I’m betting yes.

So you don’t like the incarceration metaphor. Fine. But where’s your usual willingness to speak truth?

Oh, and why do you think a bottom-up solution to anything will scale to the level needed for widespread change / impact? We don’t have much evidence of long-term substantive change in K-12 schools ever bubbling up from the bottom (because of administrative / structural factors), do we?