That may actually be an improvement. One of my math teachers in high school hated the text books and gave us sets of problems from the 1950s. Instead of 20 easy problems, it was 3 much more difficult problems. The problem in our education system is the standards are in the toilet because they are afraid to fail people. This does not cost money to correct.
No. Modern kids in the US were trained on short form articles. As a result they experience anxiety when as to read a single book per semester. They really hate being asked to read multiple books per semester for just one class.
Educating kids the way we did in 1910 would certainly be cheap, but I don’t think anyone in the country is looking for that.