"I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago. He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures, presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources, limited as they are, are much better spent helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help. Of course this brings us to the more fundamental question - are schools more for learning or daycare?"