I didn't mean to suggest it's bad that education is bigger than the military, I was merely trying to describe the scale of our spending. The military is a popular example of a a big wasteful government agency, so I thought a comparison was illustrative.
I spent four years in the military and can tell you that there's a lot of waste there. Your last sentence could very easily be applied to the military, or at least to military personnel.
I'd love to reduce spending in the military as well. If a manufacturer of military robots said "we aren't trying to replace soldiers", my first question would be "why not?"
in both cases you're thinking only about bottom line. Imagine it from the other end - what new opportunities would it open. How the military or educational powers (the US has benefited so far from being "super-" for both powers ) can be even more amplified, especially when other super-countries are emerging.
from your post above:
>and a 16% increase in efficiency (using 2007 numbers) would be sufficient to balance the federal budget deficit [1].
that means anywhere between cutting 16% of cost while maintaining the same educational result and increasing the educational result by 16% while maintaining the same cost. I'd argue that in modern world (i mean today and the next 30 years at least) increasing the educational result would be much more important than cutting the cost.
I'm focusing on cost because I don't see how a video lecture can be dramatically better than an in person one, but I can easily see how it could be just as good. This could be a failure of imagination on my part.
A model I'd like to see attempted - 2 hours of lecture (video) + 1 hour of recitation (human supervised), in lieu of 3 hours of lecture+recitation by a human. Now a single human can teach 3x more classes. That's a massive reduction in costs, but I don't see how it can significantly increase educational outcomes.
There is one caveat - I expect lecture quality would improve a bit. If only the best teachers record videos, then lecture quality will be better than average. By definition, human-delivered lectures can only be average.
For me the killer thing about Khan's lectures is how broken down into small chunks that they are. If you don't get it -- you can watch the 10m lecture again. Not to mention you can pause/rewind, there are theoretically no distractions (like disruptive members of class), and then the point you made about lecture quality.
I really like Khan's model of doing lectures/learning at home -- and using the classroom time for exercises // with the teacher (or other students) mentoring those who are stuck on a problem set.
Lecture quality improves, and students can also learn at their own rate. You should read some of the feedback on Khan lectures. Students can pause, and look up other sources. And they can daydream, but still not miss any material.
It's unclear to me that even a 1/3 reduction in lecture time is sufficient. I'd like to fundamentally change education so the teachers are really mentors and facilitators of learning and activities. Lecturing can be done via video almost exclusively -- at least for those topics where video lectures make sense.
I guess my point is that robots/tech are good at certain things, and people are good at other things. It's great for tech to take up the things that they're good at to free up people to focus on the things that they're good at, and that's what I understood TFA to be advocating, i.e. they want to augment teachers, not replace them.
I spent four years in the military and can tell you that there's a lot of waste there. Your last sentence could very easily be applied to the military, or at least to military personnel.
I'd love to reduce spending in the military as well. If a manufacturer of military robots said "we aren't trying to replace soldiers", my first question would be "why not?"