It’s still possible. There’s this sort of guerilla education movement in software with apps like Mathacademy and Mentava to really focus on actual learning, in a scientific way. I can say for my part that my son has been using Mathacademy and the results have been incredible.

The reason most educational software is not like this, as far as I can tell, is that the incentive structures aren’t there. Maximizing learning just isn’t a priority for most schools.

For this new breed of software though, they’re selling to parents, at fairly high prices. Some parents really care about their kids actually learning, and so the incentives are much more direct and aligned.