Re: teaching,..the same number of hours? WHAT NONSENSE!
Uh? Why do homeschooling parents **routinely** report that they spend less than 2 hours per day per kid? Huh? And...They get spectacularly better results.
Why do we have bright kids still sitting around high school when homeschooled kids are FINISHING their university degrees? Hm? Seems like we could cut a **lot** of teacher hours if kids, at any age, could pass a GED-like exam and be admitted to a university ( with full benefits) or an apprenticship program. Again...LOTS of saved teaching hours could be found there too!
What about those kids who are taking virtual courses by why of computer? I don't any face time with a teacher in that situation.
Then there are the kids ( I know personally) who have simply picked up a chemistry, calculus, or biology book, thoroughly studied it and passed the AP exams with the highest scores. No teacher there either!
Actually, home schooling is a good example of the sorts of productivity issues addressed in that article: home schooling makes sense precisely *because* educational productivity is low and highly resistant to improvement compared to many other sorts of economic activity, that’s for example why some people home school their children for “educational” reasons, but no one makes their own flat-screen monitors.
If we knew how to radically raise classroom productivity - if we could create a classroom situation which was 10x as productive as individual instruction - there would be much less *educational* incentive to home school.
Unfortunately despite high hopes attending the introduction of various pedological and technological advances classroom productivity has proved stubbornly resistant to improvement - which is likely the proponents of various “solutions” to the problem are so dismissive of everyone else’s.
And even so, classroom “productivity” (at least in the 85% of public schools that produce reasonably good results) is higher by your own standard, 2hs/day/one student equals 40/hrs/day for a twenty student classroom, so even if we assume that home schooling is twice as effective, a classroom is still several times as “productive” as home schooling.