Of course not; I never meant to imply that the Khan Academy style videos would ever be a drop-in replacement for school. Rather, if the traditional role of teacher is played by someone like Sal Khan, while professionals in the schools serve as mentors or coaches, you could greatly reduce the staffing requirements (and therefore costs) of educational facilities.

Are you seriously suggesting that the average elementary or middle school could "greatly reduce" it's staffing requirements? As someone else pointed out, teachers aren't just there to teach; they also serve as childcare providers.

There's probably scope for reducing staff at high schools, but don't kid yourself that technology is going to provide some magic reduction in the cost of primary education.

Edited to add: I think that making high school more like college in terms of giving kids autonomy and opportunities to do real-world types of activities outside of school would be a great idea, and conceivably could both lower the cost of running schools and increase the value of schools. But this requires much more than technology to enact, there is also an huge cultural and societal component to deal with.

You're right, and to be honest I have little knowledge of staffing requirements for an elementary school. That said, I can't imagine that transitioning from staffing teachers to staffing childcare providers would not result in fewer staff and lower costs.

At the end of the day I just see things like the Khan Academy introducing a paradigm shift in education, allowing us to think about entirely new institutions for educating young children. The idea that we need to keep 19th century education styles in the 21st century is just mind boggling to me.

Heh, well honestly I don't know all that much about elementary school staffing either! But I do know a few things about children, and you simply can't put a large number of them in a space together without adult supervision and expect much educating to go on. Now maybe kids would actually be better off with less learning and more playing, but again without adult supervision of the playing are going to see a lot of destructive behavior. So it's a tough nut to crack.

You might hope that if you managed to replace some of what teachers do with technology you could pay the childcare people less. But it's not like teachers get paid huge amounts of money today. So I'm not sure how much scope you really have for cost-cutting there.

My view is that education is expensive, and growing more expensive, primarily because the field hasn't seen the kind of productivity increases that the rest of the economy has. Some of that might be due to conservatism regarding technology among educators. But a lot of it is simply that kids require hands-on supervision, there is maximum "student-to-adult" ratio that you can't really go over, and so inevitably education costs are going to rise faster than other costs. It's part of the price we pay for a technologically sophisticated economy.

Your last point is exactly what needs to happen. Let me just add that on top of cultural and societal components, there's a massive system (the current school system) that would have to be redesigned as well. The amount of checks and balances to keep that system in place is enormous. I'm convinced that forcing it out is the only way to change it. Khan has definitely provided a good beginning, it just isn't there yet.