Agency is becoming a hot theme. More in tech circles than education, but it's seeping down. On Twitter and LinkedIn, I'm seeing various people—often tech or tech-adjacent—talking about agency. Sometimes they connect it to education and get excited.
This theme has been central to alternative education for decades. Now it's becoming mainstream. The language is finally catching up to what schools like The Socratic Experience have always understood: children thrive when they have ownership over their learning and their lives.
That's fair, and yeah, kids will find workarounds for anything, they are smart!
But most ed-tech is just digitized worksheets. Read this, click that, watch a video. Passive stuff you can skim while half paying attention.
What I'm building aims to be different: an AI tutor that uses the Socratic method. It only asks questions, never gives answers. You can't cheat by asking for the answer because it won't give you one. The only way through is to actually think.
So when the class discusses something together later, everyone actually has something to say. They already did the thinking. And the teacher doesn't have to run around helping 30 kids individually. More peer interaction, not less. That's the goal anyway.
@megha_lilly These books are much better when discussed with others! My first reading of Homer was with a book club and I would've likely given up if I was reading solo.
BYOT! https://t.co/1RCJbBBjMB is live. It's a Socratic companion for the Iliad, not SparkNotes, not a summary, just a conversation to make you actually think about what's happening. Free while I figure out if this is useful to anyone besides me.
@TheGreatB00ks “Our survival depends on our ability to read the maps left by those who saw the lights flicker and eventually darken.”
So true. Great share!
@TheGreatB00ks If you’re not embarrassed by your first reading’s “notes”… you waited too long!
My first read of the Iliad has notes that 5-years-older me looks at like, “aw bless your heart” 😅
Keeps me humble and reminds me how much the text keeps teaching across rereads.
We're partnering with @KhanAcademy to bring a suite of Gemini-powered learning and literacy tools to students, starting with the Writing Coach tool.
Writing Coach doesn’t generate answers or deliver a finished product — it walks students through the process of outlining, drafting and refining their own ideas. #BettUK2026
Dear Ed Week,
This is 100% wrong, “leave the canon to English majors” is exactly how we lose civilization.
Classical literature is not just harder content. It is liberation. It rips students out of the tiny prison of their own age, their own trends, their own slogans, their own shallow assumptions about what matters. It reminds them the world did not begin with them, and that their feelings are not the measure of truth.
Shakespeare doesn’t teach “skills.” He reveals ambition, lust, betrayal, guilt, and the cost of sin. Homer teaches courage and honor. Augustine exposes the restless heart. Dante shows that loves can be ordered rightly or twisted into ruin. These books give students a map of the soul.
The real enemy isn’t Crime and Punishment. The real enemy is a culture training kids to be bored by silence and incapable of deep thought.
So no, don’t abandon the canon because it’s hard.
It is their way out of the matrix.