I disagree with the last paragraph. I was one of those kids. I doubt I would have survived school. One of the things that helped me was getting a day job and working with adults. Suddenly I had role models who were interested in cooperation and who appreciated what I produced. Ironically I went from not knowing what the inside of my school library looked like to spending time in book stores. While I had friends in school I found that after I left I liked them much more. Instead of having a girlfriend that was mostly for show(hated her)I started having relationships with people I wanted to actually spend time with. There wasn't a non-brick and mortar option available to me to continue my education. You took your GED and that was that.
I think that technology can provide options that weren't there before. I think it can provide opportunities to reestablish communities and provide new ones. Further I think that we have underutilized the opportunities for individualization in our education system that technology can provide. Our current system doesn't help kids to become individuals. It strips them of that in much the same way that it strips them of a sense of community. Most kids aren't served well by our current system and they leave school ill prepared for both college and the workplace. I think that a change in our education system could not only increase the psychological health of our kids but also lead to better educational outcomes.
As you well know, I'm a big fan of technology (and modernity). I am not ranting that technology makes our lives worse. However, I don't think I see it the same way you do.
The problem goes beyond K-12. Mass shootings are not only perpetrated by teenagers. The fact they are perpetrated almost exclusively by young males (14-30) speaks to their mental makeup and how that mental state reacts to the modern environment they live in. The same-age grouping in school is incidental and acausal. Growing up in Jordan, where people have as easy an access to firearms as they do here, I do not recall a single school shooting, or any of the nihilistic mass shootings we hear about every other month in the US. That is because a tight-nit community exists outside of school, despite the fact that the schooling system is identical.
And it is not just mass shootings. It's everything else that stems from the separation from the tight communities that humans evolved to exist in. The increasing suicide rates, the astounding rates of anti-depressant use, and so forth.
Unfortunately, I don't think technology can create a real sense of community for the reasons you mentioned. It DOES create opportunity. Technology is power. And community can only be forged from the steel of mutual suffering. A community of choice cannot truly exist, because community brings with it its own set of problems. And as long as you can go "**** you people, I'm out of here", real community cannot exist.
Technology has created this community for me. It is really the only community I'm part of. I know some of the people of this forum better than I do anyone else in my life beside my family and a couple of my closest friends. And yet, I can just log off one day and never come back. My life would go on the same, and I can join other similarly loose communities.
But that is not the same as being in a real community. Think of the people of East Germany before the collapse of the USSR. They lived in ugly apartment blocks in a state of relative economic poverty. But due to the limits of their resources, extended families lived together, kids would be playing outside together, mixing up with adults, and were cared for by the "tribe" at large for most of the day. That's community. Once the USSR collapsed and East Germany modernized, that construct of community disappeared. They gained in material terms, which is important. But they also lost in human terms.
So I don't think technology can create meaningful community. Only scarcity can. At least, not the type of community that many humans naturally crave. The one that leads to group-think and makes an enemy of otherness and judges your every action through a thousand eyes. But that's the type of community that gives many people a sense of belonging.
When Steve Bannon talks about foreigners destroying "the civic society", he's mourning the loss of community. His attribution is wrong. The same would be the case even if he lived in his white-only utopia, because the culprit is modernity, not skin color or "culture". But he is talking about something real nonetheless.
