I agree with your broad point about the fairly poor state of education and its central role in the country's future. I don't agree with some other things: one o

I agree with your broad point about the fairly poor state of education and its central role in the country's future. I don't agree with some other things: one of which being "at least a random billionaire can have the money and direction to get things done, even if not all their ideas pan out." I argued that above so I won't rehash it, but to summarize, I hold the precautionary principle in high regard, and you - I think - prefer iteration and experimentation; we can agree to disagree. Otherwise I found your comment a bit contradictory. You don't like recent investments in classroom technology and say that technology isn't a solution, but you seem to think that technology is an at least partially adequate replacement for the classroom itself. Mark Zuckerberg wasted $100m in New Jersey (was it a waste? How do we know?) but seem happy for that pattern to continue. To pick on a specific theme you touched on a few times: learning isn't even mostly about information. Ask anyone who bought a textbook in college then slept through lectures and never spoke to their professor. Kahn Academy doesn't represent a visionary, Montessori-compatible approach to learning math; instead it's a scaled up, gamified, alternative to an already stale math education pattern of rote memorization, depersonalized instruction, and practice problems. That's a part of math education - you have to learn how to apply techniques after all - but hardly represents the paradigm shift in math teaching that gets talked about here frequently. Don't get me wrong: Khan is a very good thing, especially for students struggling with bad teachers, but it's not the next step. And that's just talking about math education. I don't agree at all that schools are less important. Schools are the only place where kids have mandatory exposure to specialists who's only job is to teach them things. To my point above, information is not education. 'Education' is the thing that happens when decent teachers with adequate materials and reasonable tools spend focused time with children. So you need time - which means smaller class sizes; you need tools, which really is a solved problem requiring only situational application of cash; you need materials, same; and you need decent teachers, which is a matter of training and status and autonomy and job satisfaction and vocation, and that is a really thorny mess. It's a generational political problem, not a thing a billionaire can meaningfully affect with a recommendation algorithm for syllabus modules. So I guess my conclusion is - a really just absolutely epically well-funded lobbying foundation with a world-class policy board would do far more good than a series of expensive experiments playing with the margins of the existing borked system.