Ah, interesting. One thing that strikes me from reading biographies of people who lived in the past is how different the university system used to be. Of course, old universities were only for aristocratic men, but they also seemed to be a lot less industrialised than they are now.

Much more student/professor interaction (as opposed to now where a professor might lecture a classroom of a few hundred and leave all student interactions to a few overworked PhDs), more academic freedom and less need to cram for exams (even if the exams were tougher, people didn't need to beat the bell curve in the hope of a job at MckGoldmanDeloitte, freeing them to pursue knowledge for the sake of it if so inclined). I'm told Oxford and Cambridge still preserve some aspects of the old system, I don't know about other countries. The current system definitely slows down the smartest people unnecessarily, as the Thiel program has shown.

I imagine there are many more leverage points in the current education system that could enable similar improvements.