I am still not sure about this whole subject. You are absolutely right - with internet access education is basically free and ubiquitous.
But the more important thing is in my opinion some kind of "drive" or "stickiness". We all know about the ridiculous high drop out rate from most MOOC courses. I think it might be that it is far less about education what makes kids succeed, but parents who are able to show their kids - may it be by example, by preaching, by pushing them - that they have to stick with things, even when it is "not fun", in order to succeed.
But this can compensate this with money - it allows you to push a kid in some kind of system (boarding school, etc) where it is more painful (social pressure, etc) to not stick with something (school) than otherwise.
I've thought about this a LOT, as a person who hated school growing up and makes a living with skills I picked up almost entirely online.
I think the current system of traditional schools and online courses is a sort of awkward/silly transition state. Online education (as far as I've seen) is trying too hard to become some sort of 'school-but-in-the-cloud'. It would be like selling MP3s through record-stores-in-the-cloud in album form, ignoring things like YouTube and Spotify.
Online education shouldn't (in my opinion) be about MOOC courses. It should be about literally figuring out what you want to do, finding people who can help you, building actual relationships with real people doing real work, and then literally getting involved and literally doing stuff. More like massively-distributed-apprenticeships.
It's already happening, and I'm a proud early case study.
We've replaced a landed aristocracy with a financial aristocracy.
Modern aristocrats farm money, in the form of rents paid for access to money. Land ownership is a useful byproduct.
It's still a feudal system. In the same way medieval peasants were tied to their lord's demesne, the modern peasant class is chained inside the local capital flow network and dependent on its favours for survival.
Education will only get someone so far towards becoming a financial farmer.
The irony is that money is a fiction anyway, and socially it's just a proxy for executive power.
So when the aristocratic class decided to 'fund' a project they're simply giving it an aristocratic nod - which they only do if they believe there's an acceptable chance they can benefit from it personally.
No actual stuff flows from one person to another. There's just a temporary infusion of transferred political power and status.
>the modern peasant class is chained inside the local capital flow network and dependent on its favours for survival.
This comment being posted on HN is quite ironic. Unless you are philosophically opposed to the Internet there have never been more options for capital access or less reliance on local "aristocracy". The contortions needed to make these kind of arguments should give some indication of their veracity.
That the aristocracy is not geographically local makes it less socially humiliating to ask them for help, but the arrangement is still financially problematic.
That the aristocracy has become more abstract does not mean it has ceased to exist.
So when Kickstarter is bigger or if you consider all crowdfunding then it is an aristocracy? My point still holds. If reality gets in the way of dogma you might want to abandon your dogma.
Your esoteric examples are irrelevant. Come back when a significant percentage of the population finance their house with crowdfunding rather than a mortgage. You seem to be grasping at straws to defend your dogma, and quite honestly you drew a pretty short straw.
As a former teacher, I agree with you completely here. Through high school, the good teachers are as much motivators as they are instructors. That never seems to get mentioned in discussions on "the future of education".
This is why I firmly believe that while the future of education will be digitally mediated, the profession of teaching will grow towards "very high-touch instructor" rather than "supplemental tutor".
The digital tools will allow for significantly richer personalization - both with respect to the content being learned, as well as the facilitation of that learning via a skilled instructor. And, while we have the beginnings of these (digital/conceptual/pedagogical)tools, we don't a public conception yet of what this will actually look like.
I'm only responding to the idea that the potential to be educated is not well distributed. It's the ability and willingness to exploit that potential which is not evenly distributed.
But the more important thing is in my opinion some kind of "drive" or "stickiness". We all know about the ridiculous high drop out rate from most MOOC courses. I think it might be that it is far less about education what makes kids succeed, but parents who are able to show their kids - may it be by example, by preaching, by pushing them - that they have to stick with things, even when it is "not fun", in order to succeed.
But this can compensate this with money - it allows you to push a kid in some kind of system (boarding school, etc) where it is more painful (social pressure, etc) to not stick with something (school) than otherwise.