Reduction in the sense of cooking down to essentials?

I meant in the sense of simply reducing the total amount, but yes, that would help a fair bit. I do think that some degree of reduction in the sense you mention has been done(students almost always study small segments of total works in intro classes- No one for example reads all of Critique of Pure Reason in an intro class) , but I'm not completely convinced that it has been that successful or done it completely to the right things.