[tsimionescu]

Having individual tutors for each child is not often discussed because it is self-evidently impossible for any cost whatsoever - it would require far too high a percentage of the workforce of a country to be dedicated to education. But it is the most responsible thing for the difference between the education the elites get, especially the elites of the past, and the general education.

Sure, this doesn't mean you could just fire all teachers and dissolve all schools. You still need people to physically be there and interact with the children in various ways. But if you could separate the actual teaching from the child care part, and if you could design individualized courses for each child with something approaching the skill of the best teachers in the whole world, you would get an inconceivably better educational system for the entire population.

And I don't need to work in education for much of this. Like all others, I was intimately acquainted with the educational system (in my country) for 16 years of my life through direct experience, and much more since in increasingly less direct experience. I have very very good and very direct experience of the variance between teachers and the impact that has on how well students understand and interact with the material.

[duped]

That's like claiming you know how to run a restaurant because you like to eat out. Or worse actually, since you're extrapolating your individual experience from a small set of educational systems to education as a whole.

If you're looking for insight into the problems faced in education, speak to educators. I really doubt they would tell you that the quality of individual instructors is their biggest problem.

[tsimionescu]

Educators don't like to discuss the performance of other educators, as most professionals don't like to diss their colleagues, especially not in front of their customers. But the quality of educators is absolutely a huge problem, so huge that there are even consecrated sayings about it (those who can, do; those who can't, teach). So huge that one of the most well known rock anthems of all time is about the poor quality of educators (Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall Part II).

Educators are the best people to ask about how to make their jobs easier. They are not necessarily the best people to ask about how to make children's education better.

Edit:

> That's like claiming you know how to run a restaurant because you like to eat out.

No, it's like claiming you know some things about the problems of restaurants, and about the difference between good and bad restaurants, after spending 8+ hours a day almost every day, for 16 years, eating out at restaurants. Which I think would be a decent claim.