The other thing that people tend to have a hard time imagining as their independence has been slowly-but-surely squeezed out of them is that this does not have to mean that the only other schooling option is a kid alone in front of their tablet watching Khan's videos at home. Khan's videos are a tool that can be applied in many ways. Five families can band together to trade off on who is watching what on what days and share questions and answers, or a day care organization can use it to bootstrap themselves into an affordable private school. Online companies can bootstrap into having banks of problems, using that as the content. And of course it doesn't just have to be Khan doing this, anybody can.
This doesn't just enable one thing, this and all the things that will happen enable an amazing multiplicity of ways to approach the problem of teaching. (And I started to say "teaching children" but even that is being too specific.)
(This is just one example, there's a lot of others. Too often people think the choice is "government run service" or "people scrabbling for scraps in the street as the wolves howl in the distance", but that's not how it works. Government-run services may not always be a bad idea but they do have a strong tendency to freeze in The One True Approach for decades after they are no longer optimal. 19th-century-style schooling's days are numbered, no matter how much the unions protest in the early 21st.)
Completely agree, but I believe that change can come only by example.
Majority of people plays safe. There is nothing wrong in that. If someone can show them better choice, not by talking, but by creating better private school for underprivileged kids, they will start sending their kids in such schools.
When some percentage of people accepts that there are more options, I believe that more intelligent debate will emerge.
Wow, it is really refreshing to see intelligent discussion of education here after mostly seeing little more than vacuous bloviating about it on reddit.
This doesn't just enable one thing, this and all the things that will happen enable an amazing multiplicity of ways to approach the problem of teaching. (And I started to say "teaching children" but even that is being too specific.)
(This is just one example, there's a lot of others. Too often people think the choice is "government run service" or "people scrabbling for scraps in the street as the wolves howl in the distance", but that's not how it works. Government-run services may not always be a bad idea but they do have a strong tendency to freeze in The One True Approach for decades after they are no longer optimal. 19th-century-style schooling's days are numbered, no matter how much the unions protest in the early 21st.)