Technology

It would be trivial to roll it out in a way that it can only be accessed from school grounds or while an adult is supervising. The adult could even be in charge of "clicking next" if we really didn't trust the integrity of our system. I agree that it would be difficult to control access from home on a child's own device given that children are notoriously terrible at creating passwords and maintaining a secure system, and I'm not sure that something like a yubikey would fare any better since it could be lost or stolen.

But I feel like you're not taking a moment to argue with yourself, because we already have systems in place that only students are allowed access to, so that's not the part that needs solving, nor would it be a novel attack surface.

Imagine for a moment, the magical ability for students at a school to walk onto a playground where they find students from all over the world also playing. The potential for learning and understanding would be incredible. Learning about new languages, customs, locations, current events, everything, could be done just by walking over and talking to them. If such a room existed, it shouldn't just be an option, it should be something we make time for our kids to do, just like recess.

The point is, if the barrier to communication with your peers all over the world is as low as possible, then we open the door for international relations on a scale the world has never seen before. We don't need to have kids isolated to small towns for their entire lives, growing up to vote for border walls because they're scared of the "terrorists". Instead we would have a world full of people who are able to see people in other countries as people, if not actual friends. And I don't think it's enough for this to be a private service that some schools dabble in, I think it should be publicly funded and encouraged internationally.

Yeah, there are challenges in the implementation, but compared to other things we spend money on, I think the value proposition is easily justified.