I think the video model of teaching will be the wave of the future. Of course, this will completely eviscerate the standard Teacher/Lecture model of teaching. This would also seem to drop the price of education down considerably when you can learn basic Calculus by just watching a couple video lectures.
Also, I fully expect the Teachers Unions to lobby for barriers to entry to make sure that their degrees are the “official” ones and, as Doug Casey once said, they’ll thrash around like a T-Rex in its death throes to maintain their monopoly on recognized education.
Freeing up education like this would make our society exponentially more wealthy, and it’s a shame that people think throwing money at education will solve it. An education could be a modest fee and the price of an Internet connection and not thousands of dollars per student. Frustrating.
Well that’s the trick - to get employers to value “unofficial” degrees and “unrecognized” education. It is ultimately up to the market to provide students with new ways to signal employers of their knowledge and achievements. The state does not require you to earn a GED, but the prevailing business culture values these “official degrees.” That said, it would certainly help if schooling were not compulsory and the state stopped subsidizing higher education.
Also: I smiled plenty of times doing derivatives. My calculus teacher was a crazy guy.
You’re right, Michael. I wonder if it would become a giant game theory experiment where the people who won’t want to put up with public schooling or enforced schooling feel the need to go along anyway since that’s what the market seems to demand, yet the market demands it because employers figure the masses want to continue “official” schooling. It’ll have to take a massive attitude shift in order for the market to adjust to the idea that maybe degrees aren’t the end-all be-all. You’d think having a 3rd party testing agency would be a better and more cost-effective way to look for competency, but employers can just count on the people entering the workforce to throw tens of thousands of dollars at schooling who will do the competency-testing for them.