[philwelch]

"So no one to monitor and encourage the students, to watch that they're not going lord-of-the-flies and building a bonfire out of the learning terminals"

It's an amusing mental image, but let's be honest with ourselves. If the system is intended to prevent the students from going lord-of-the-flies, it's already failed. School systems don't even reliably stop students from engaging in outright physical violence on each other on a regular basis.