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Live instruction is more valuable than self-instruction to a majority of children of any age. The point can be made by taking your question 1 step further. If

• gwern 17y ago
  The obvious answer is that what a class buys is a sunk cost, to force the parent to send the kid to the class, and then the kid out of sheer boredom or osmosis will wind up learning something. If the kid had the motivation to begin with, the book would be quite enough. (I had the motivation simply because I wanted to show up my elder sister; so the class was a waste for me.) Which directly leads to one of the questions I posed: how could this startup force the target kids to learn, if it's remote? Without a good answer to that, I don't think it's a good idea. (And on a tangent: school can be a good idea, even for motivated students, simply because some things are very difficult to teach yourself out of a book. It'd be kind of hard to learn how to read and write from just books, for example.)