> if we could get the rich people ... to fund this idea One problem is that there is very little incentive for the average rich person to care about making edu

> if we could get the rich people ... to fund this idea One problem is that there is very little incentive for the average rich person to care about making education affordable. After all, if poor kids can get a good education, then how is the rich person supposed to make his or her children competitive in the job market? (although, I admit, rich kids generally don't ever need to get normal jobs) Another problem is that the current rip-off book market would lobby very strongly against anything that makes knowledge affordable. After all, they already do put their foot down anytime a school tries to use used books or otherwise cheaper alternatives. A third problem is that there are currently a plethora of "brands", if you will, of books for any given academic topic. Having a centralised source of knowledge would put the majority of the authors out of business. You can expect a lot of these people to work against any proposition to re-use existing (especially unrestricted) knowledge. Personally I have felt for a long time that the educational system is ridiculous, in not only the financial and efficiency realms, but also in other areas. Mainstream education is far too focused on preparing people for -- you guessed it -- becoming teachers themselves. It's as if, just maybe, those devising the curriculum are biased in their idea of what an education is for. This phenomenon is similar to when parents bring up their kids in such a way as to prepare the kids for walking in the parents' footsteps, rather than recognising that one size doesn't fit all. For the majority of people, a vocational path would be far more efficient. On the topic of your proposal, what I would like to see perhaps the most is that quality learning material on a given topic be re-used and built upon directly rather than having hundreds of people constantly and continually re-inventing the wheels of education. Also, academic knowledge and learning materials themselves need to be freely available. The money that people and the government currently put toward buying overpriced textbooks needs to go to making for-the-people electronic learning materials. With proper oversight, I bet we as a society could make even better learning materials than those currently in mainstream use for less than a quarter of the money that's currently drained into the system. I also agree that we have the technology to vastly improve the learning experience. Unlike advanced AI and other technologies which still have a long way to go, we have more than enough CPU power, bandwidth, storage capacity, and know-how to make a very effective learning system that's completely automated.