On another note, do I read you well enough to say that you wish to optimise on the teaching side? What if you could get more mileage out of optimising on the learning side, for instance propagating the urge of really wanting to learn stuff?

Yes, I have been talking about optimizing the teaching side. Optimizing the learning side would be great as well! I don't really have any insightful thoughts on that though.

I'd also be interested how you'd set your plan in motion. Given infinite resources, what particular thing you know about would you change first. (Describe it to my system 1, pretty please)

Given infinite resources? Dependency tree!!! I'd build an online resource that does the following. Each node is a micro-concept. The nodes are linked according to their dependencies (to know A, you need to know B). And each node has a lesson/explanation, a test to see if the student understands the corresponding concept, and some practice exercises and projects. It'd take a ton of resources to organize the information properly, produce all of the explanations, tests, exercises... do it well, iterate etc.

As for practicality - http://lesswrong.com/lw/lh6/the_superstar_effect/bt7d

in my experience it's much more the coordination problems

See the above comment about practicality (that's the best I've got).