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Xachariah comments on Stupid Questions January 2015 - Less Wrong
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I have a developing opinion that I'm not quite sure how to word.
It seems that schools all over the world are teaching the same lessons, but are all trying to recreate the wheel. I sense that it'd be more efficient if a bunch of effort and resources went in to each lesson, and that lesson was made available for everyone.
Elon Musk gave a good analogy (paraphrasing)
I sense that there is some sort of economic logic/terminology that applies here and that better articulates what I'm trying to say.
My attempt at explaining it a bit more formally. Consider a lesson on mitosis. Say you have 100 classrooms you need to teach this lesson to. And say you have 100 employees. I think it'd be more efficient for those 100 employees to work at creating an optimal lesson, and then providing that lesson (via a website or something) to students. Given that the lesson can (largely) be delivered via software, it's non-rivalrous (my consumption doesn't take anything away from your consumption), and thus can be distributed to everyone at no marginal cost.
Anyway, I hope I did a good enough job explaining such that someone can recognize what I'm trying to say. I'd be really happy if anyone was able to help me further my understanding.
You may be interested in the term 'inverted classroom', if you're not already aware of it.
The basic idea is that it's the normal school system you grew up with, except students watch video lectures as homework, then do all work in class while they've got an expert there to help. Also, the time when the student is stuck in one place and forced to focus is when they're actually doing the hard stuff.
There's so many reasons why it's better than traditional education. I just hope inverted classrooms start to catch on sooner rather than later.
(Edit: I know this isn't your exact proposal, but it uses many of the features you mention and it can be immediately grafted into the existing public school system with a single change of curriculum and the creation of some videos. It's the low hanging fruit for education.)