Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

Since you care about education so deeply, but also seem to be critical of a lot of recent technological developments that appear to be more accessible than some of the systems / approaches we had in the past: Do you think that it is a reasonable path to embrace technologies with shortcomings, and perhaps even to utilize a reduction in expressiveness of UIs, such as hiding the ability to multitask, or to employ the power of games to "draw us in [and keep us spellbound]" (where [this] part may be a danger), if this can form points of entry for young people who may otherwise not have found their way into technology (think smartphones in rural areas without reliable other means to guarantee access to information to large numbers of people; e.g. lack of mentors and role models), or would it be more promising to rather focus on developing alternative means for "on-boarding"?

There are several questions here.

A prime UI design principle -- which is also an education principle -- is that you have to start where the learners/users are. ("All learning happens on the fringes of what you know" -- David Ausubel)

For children especially -- and most humans -- a main way of thinking and learning and knowing is via stories. On the other hand most worthwhile ideas in science, systems, etc. are not in story form (and shouldn't be). So most modern learning should be about how to help the learner build parallel and alternate ways of knowing and learning -- bootstrapping from what our genetics starts us with.

And -- everything we are immersed in causes "normal" to be reset, for most people invisibly. This should be a conscious part of the "helping learning" process.

This could be too elliptical an answer ...