I normally don't make moderation comments when people are criticizing YC startups (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Thoughtful critique is fine, but what you posted here was egregious and the kind of thing we ban accounts for. No more of this, please, regardless of the topic.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Please don't miss this one either:
"Don't be snarky."
or this one:
"Be kind."
Online school families, as a particular example, have a wide variety of needs that draw them to the model of learning (e.g., a child being medically homebound; a child who practices/trains for competitive sports or arts; or a child who desires flexibility in where, when, and how fast they work on their academic courses).
The point about academic bonding is that students in any one of our learning pods will be from a range of ages (generally no more than 3 years apart at most), given the freedom to work on different subjects at the same time, and encouraged to work at whatever pace is best for them. In other words, I agree with you that academic bonding is a really good thing, but it is just hard for us to nurture given the flexibility inherent in our model. Therefore, we take extra care to make sure that the students build relationships over the other parts of the pod experience.
For many online school families, they have struggled with this for years before COVID and will continue to struggle with it after; we are designing this program precisely to address this challenge.
I also wanted to address the last part of your comment: all kids of the same age learning the same thing is indeed a disadvantage of today's traditional education system. I hope you'll agree that there's nothing biological about 10 year olds needing to learn the exact same thing at the exact same time. Children proceed along unpredictable paths of learning at unpredictable paces and our jobs as educators (or in my case, as someone who supports educators) is to enable as much of that flexibility as possible for the children.