The issue is that many schools are expected to teach students at scale. If parents are willing to spend more time coaching their kids instead of outsourcing it, then the problem would be less severe. Good schools generally all have a low teacher to student ratio for a reason. Bloom's 2 sigma problem is very real, spend more time one on one with your kids and even poor pedagogy can yield results.
I don’t know if it’s utopian or dystopian but in 20 years we may have the majority of education being done by AIs. That’s the only practical way of getting to 1:1.
I'm cautiously optimistic that it's utopian-ish. If we do it right and supplant it with human interaction and assessment then kids will be better off. They'll be able to learn at their own pace with content that is built around their interests and style of learning best. They can learn when they feel like learning instead of having to use the typical rigid and regimented structure of today's classroom.
I'm not trying to be all hippy about it - kids still need assessment and evidence that learning occurred and there needs to be accountability. And teachers aren't going away. Human leadership is important and someone needs to be accountable for what a kid has learned, etc. A dystopian implementation would be no teacher and a parent just gets a daily report.
I taught for about ten years at the high school level, but I work as a consultant in the tech industry now. While the curricular piece might seem like the natural starting point, the nut to crack would be increasing the trustability of in-class assessments as accurate data on a student's knowledge/abilities are required for that kind of curricular individualization. Good teachers do this kind of assessment, of course - but it's difficult at scale. It's easier for curricular content that is hierarchical in nature, but a great deal of content is not. Assessment is a pretty mature research space (and AI advances to help generate/curate assessment content could be game changing), but there is a block - for some reason - preventing assistive instructional tools for teachers becoming prevelant. It remains, largely, an analog process. That said, I would love to leverage my teaching experience to help design and build such a tool.
> [AI is] the only practical way of getting to 1:1.
It is not the only way: getting other students to teach. Yes it has a bootstrapping problem of quality and requires QA on the delivery but it is still definitely doable at scale.
