The value of education to a rationalist comes not from the acquisition of knowledge, but the illustration of its absence. Now learning facts and relationships is crucial for successfully navigating the world, but recognizing the gaps in your map is arguably more important.
Put it this way: Making the right decision when you know the truth is easy. Making the right decision when you don't know is hard. Making the right decision when you don't know that you don't know the truth is hard but feels easy, so you're unlikely to notice your mistake until it comes back to bite you.
Effective education, then, is not so much about obtaining information as constructing a framework within which to organize information and quantify uncertainty about that information. An intelligent scholar knows of many fields which he does not have a clear picture of the content of, so that, should he require that content, he can acquire it quickly and efficiently. He does not necessarily carry around that knowledge, but knowing that it exists, can grapple with questions which concern it.
One of my many concerns with the utility of conventional schooling is that it does not adequately communicate this theory of scholarship and consequently stunts the intellectual growth of, well, everyone. This is, probably, my greatest cause for trepidation when considering foundational education projects.
By foundational education projects, I'm referring to things in the vein of Crash Course, which present the basic content of subjects in new formats in hopes of promoting wider consumption. A higher cultural baseline would, I think, be a good thing, but these projects do not necessarily tackle every aspect implicit in such projects. Simply communicating information, as stated above, does not in itself represent a victory condition for society. I worry that this is merely giving people enough rope to hang themselves.
Ideally, the approach taken instead would be to provide a background level of knowledge for all subjects, highlighting the degree of the student's ignorance, and then allowing them to pursue further information in those fields which attract their interested. Nominally, one could model the existing education system as this: primary and secondary school as the background information phase, undergraduate college as the focus on a particular field, and graduate school as diving into a narrow subfield.
In practice, this is not really what is happening. Each level of the current system is subject to its own sets of contradictory incentives with little if any coordination between levels. Furthermore, the student would require an extremely low time preference for us to treat this model as even slightly successful.
Allowing higher specialization at an earlier stage requires more resources in the traditional classroom. It would not require nearly so many resources in alternative approaches (such as the flipped classroom or autonomous online learning), but I have extremely little confidence that those will be implemented in a manner which brings more benefits than costs in the next several decades. Deep, genuine change is a rare phenomena.
Those of us wishing to cause it have our work cut out for us.
