1) that our theories about education are bad, and that we've been cargo culting traditional education and haven't made any significant changes in the process for hundreds of years,
2) our theories about how to handle the future of education with the new tools that we now have were doomed to failure because of that, and
3) with no theoretical foundation, charlatans tried to push a theory that sheer proximity to technology would have an emergent magical effect on education (while another set of charlatans push a theory that technology has a magical dampening effect on education.)
It's the same situation we're in with governance, or law. The English accidentally and clumsily developed a Parliament that worked, and the people who wiped the King's ass developed into a cabinet. It was productive. We then formalized it by examining what had been done and simply writing it down and sometimes streamlining it. We also do that explicitly in the common law, where we assume that every judicial decision ever made was correct, and concentrate on when they contradict each other to make changes. It's productive, but it's not theory; they're descriptions of history.
Covid was a test for Edtech, and it failed horribly. We need to ground education in reality: we're trying to force unwilling children to remember things. We need to focus on their wills, and their memories, and to come up with theory. We can experiment on adults, although the difference between adult education and children's education is that adults are self-motivated, so this would concentrate on memory methods. When focused on children, how can we give a child the discipline to feel like they want to participate in and contribute to the world? Does that have to do more with social services, the safety net, and giving children real responsibility earlier than with educational theory?
Recent interesting read for me was a failure and partial success trying to use spaced repetition in the classroom. His partial answer was that it was better when everyone shared the same screen and answered together, you move slower than you wish you could, and you don't demand that they remember forever. Also, from my reading, the expected schedule of schooling completely disrupted what he was trying to do. Schools have to be redone, not tweaked. People knew this in the 19th and early 20th century, even if they didn't manage to come up with a formula that worked.
Warning, lots of filler, but also lots of content: "Seven Years of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F6ZTtBXn2cFLmWPdM/seven-year...