[lo_zamoyski]

Indeed. Education isn't supposed to "scale". We've mucked around with education so much and subjected it to tech fad after tech fad that we hardly have anything resembling education.

Because this has been going on so long, most people's reference point for what constitutes "education" is simply off, mistaking "training" or something like that for it. But the purpose of education is intellectual formation, the ability to reason competently, and the comprehension of basic reality, which enables genuine intellectual freedom (there are moral presuppositions, too; immorality deranges the mind). This is what the classical liberal arts were about.

The very bare minimum criterion (and it is a very bare minimum) for someone to be able to claim to be educated is not only knowledge of their field, but knowledge of the intellectual nature, foundations, and basis of their field in the greater intellectual scope. I would not hold someone with only that bare minimum in especially high esteem vis-a-vis education, but even that bar is higher than what education today provides.

[bonoboTP]

There are simply not enough teachers who can provide such an ideal, imagined education, at least not for the current rate of teacher salaries (and it's very far off). The educational strategy has to scale to real people, real teachers and real students as they are in the flesh, not some ivory tower pipe dream. We've had decades of this "we should teach how to think, not what to think".

Alternatively,if you don't care about scale, as in rolling out a system to the population at large, then yeah, this kind of advanced education exists, it's just very selective and is in advanced extracurricular or obtained through private tutors.

[lo_zamoyski]

This also assumes that universal education is a sensible aim. I think that's doubtful and that it contributes to these sorts of burdens and waters down the quality of education in the process.

As a concrete example, for a few decades now, we're been pushing primary school students toward university education quite aggressively and broadly. It was quite common to scare students toward university by claiming that without a university degree, they would be flipping burgers at McDonalds. This, of course, is completely false and it is disgraceful that such dishonest and manipulative tactics were used. Today, because of rising university costs and the dubious value of most university education, we're seeing this idea challenged at the level of the university. Gen Z's interest in trades has increased by something like 1500%. I don't see this as a negative. In Germany, for instance, there is a more balanced distribution across trades and university.

Now, I admit that the situation is a bit different in the case of primary education, but here, too, I think we do well to think in terms of reform rather than technology and patching up a pedagogically and administratively broken system. The American education system spends an inordinate amount of money on each student with little to show for it. If, for instance, those funds were allocated wisely, then a number of problems would likely go away or become smaller issues.

Of course, what does "allocate wisely" mean? Education systems require a principled grasp of what education is for. If you don't have a sound anthropological grasp of what it means to be human and how education is supposed to enable one's humanity and serve human persons, then you are in no position to run an education system or decide school curricula. I cannot stress this enough. Our education system today is very "pragmatist"; we're constantly told we're being prepared for a career and a job market. That's not education: it's job training. Of course, schools are quite mediocre as training facilities, because they're sort of a halfway house between training and whatever residue of classical education still lingers. So that's one distinction: training vs. education. Now, if we simply accept this distinction, we should ask: how should one organize training on the one hand and education on the other to enable each to be successful within its own circumscribed domain? And what if we keep things as local and decentralized as possible? I guarantee you would not see the inept system we have today.

So, with this...

> There are simply not enough teachers who can provide such an ideal, imagined education

...I agree, but again, my view is that at best we are buying time with these sorts of technological gimmicks. We're also social animals. We cannot keep isolating ourselves behind technology under the pretext of "practicality".

[bonoboTP]

Yes, Germany has different educational tracks that are decided fairly early, at 10 or 12 years old (with some opportunity to change tracks). I don't think Americans like this idea.

Still, 40% of young adults have a tertiary degree (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/09/education-at-a-...) while it's 47% in the US, so I wouldn't say it's a huge difference. And its not just a US thing, Denmark stands at 45%. So I wouldn't spin too big of a narrative around this.

Education is a field where decade after decade they try some new fad which is basically the old fad re-dressed and never really learn much. That's because teachers and their methodologies don't really have that big of an effect. A stable non-chaotic learning environment and access to the learning material though any kind of presentation, and books gets you to pretty much as good as it gets. To have a real effect, you need private tutoring for the gifted or very small groups of talent nurturing, which goes far beyond the default curriculum. But again, these don't fit the current zeitgeist, so they will keep on pushing "critical thinking" and "how to think", no matter how much they fail.