I think his analysis of the education system is spot on. Basically education majors are typically among the dumbest people in college. And they are often exactly the ones that promote 'technology' or in a similar vein alternative teaching methods as the panacea that will suddenly turn little Johnny into Einstein.

(I briefly taught math in high school and people were shocked I didn't want to have anything to do with graphing calculators and other gizmos.)

But I think his proposed solution still has problems. He's basically saying to turn high schools into colleges and let them differentiate themselves and compete for students. One problem with that for instance is that kids are more geographically confined than college students. So you create a real logistics problem in having to safely shuffle kids around to far-flung physical schools. It's one thing for a school district to bus children from the area to one centralized school, but another for them to bus kids all over the place.

Ironically I also think that technology can offer the solution to the problems with having schools be individualized. That interview is from the early-Internet year of 1995. Now with things like Skype (or soon, VR) you can actually have a real live interactive discussion with a teacher from anyplace in the country.

What if schools were more like education centers? You would simply bus all the children into a central location. But instead of having big individual and undifferentiated classrooms, students would simply go to small rooms where they would meet with a few other skill-matched students from their school or from the Internet where they would interact with a high-paid, high-skill teacher in something like a Skype chat (who may be simultaneously teaching 100s of students all across the country at once.)

You would staff the school with 'facilitators' (aka low-paid babysitters) to keep people out of trouble and on task and also tutors to help people with homework problems. You can also have lab spaces, etc. where students would work on the physical aspects of their science courses.

So students would proceed through high-school much like they proceed through college. Not on a grade-by-grade basis, but by moving through a curriculum at their own pace.

As far as TV is concerned? I think he's right. TV is what it is because the market has optimized the shows for cost versus viewership.

But I also think that's OK. TV/Hollywood movies are just the place where most people go to turn off their brain. If I want more intellectual entertainment I'll read a book. In the meantime there are programs aimed at a more niche, sophisticated audience, like things on PBS.