You are not making a counterargument. The operating word is “masses”. 1-on-1 doesn’t scale. The political reality may be that support for schooling would crater if the report were widely known, but the alternative isn’t realistically “modern schools” vs. “1-on-1 tutoring”, but rather “modern schools” vs. “nothing”, or, optimistically, “modern schools” vs. “something not yet invented”.
Put 30 kids in front of a teacher for 8 hours - that's about 15 minutes of instructor attention per kid per day on average. If we assume that one on one sessions need to last 8 hours, then yeah the system doesn't scale; but more realistically the kid's educational needs could be met in a fraction of the time. One person can tutor dozens of kids a week if they do it full time, but even better you can tutor without doing it full time. Full time teachers are a limited resource and if yours isn't great at some or all of the job, you just have to suffer the consequences; but there is a massive pool of people who are capable of teaching a kid something, and the harm of a mediocre tutor is minimal and easily overcome.
One on one tutoring is already extremely widely employed, and plenty of platforms have popped up to help it effectively scale. Pretty much the only people who don't use it are those who can't afford it, a problem regular schooling would also face if not publicly paid for. It takes very little imagination to picture a system where people get vouchers to spend on tutoring services and a simple method for large numbers of people to qualify as tutors eligible to accept these vouchers.
Unless I'm mistaken, you're assuming one of two things:
1) 1-on-1 tutoring happens online. I would like evidence that this is effective, given the challenges this pandemic has put in evidence. Particularly, note that this is supposed to be aimed at all children, not just particularly motivated or interested ones that will sit quietly learning at their computer.
2) 1-on-1 tutoring does not happen online. In which case you either have to add the cost of getting the kids to the tutor (if the tutor stays put, maximizing their throughput) or getting the tutor to the kids (reducing their throughput and their student count).
Beyond that, modern schooling is an entire system that addresses many many problems in society including:
- Daycare for kids ages 5-18
- Logistics of getting kids to and from school (in the US)
- Logistics of providing shared facilities for things like experimental science classes .
- Logistics of providing shared access to higher level computing facilities than individual poor students can afford.
- For a nontrivial number of students, access to food during the day.
- Many more, because I am not an expert and I literally came up with this list off the top of my head.
Are these problems unsurmountable? Do they all need to be solved by the educational system? Maybe not. But imperfectly as it solves them, it does address them for now. You can't throw out a significant part of the public service provided by public education and claim you successfully replaced it.
I was envisioning primarily in person tutoring, which has been effectively done for a very long time. That said, online tutoring is an option that many can and would employ. That a few kids might need a different structure is a very good argument for the flexibility of tutoring.
We already transport students and people already commute to work. The money you currently pay to stick kids in your school district on a bus can be used to facilitate transportation for tutoring. Some tutoring services may provide a central location while others may bring the tutor to you, and you pick the one that works best for your family.
As for your other points:
Dedicated daycare facilities can be more efficiently set up if that is their only objective. Effectively teaching hundreds of students at the same time is impossible, so you need dozens of teachers and classrooms. But if your only concern is making sure they don't kill eachother, you can easily throw a few hundred kids in a gym or a plsyground and tell them to have fun with only a small handful of moderators - which is exactly what most schools do during recess. A good portion of the current school population probably doesn't even need such services (if your 18 year old needs to be babysat, they're going to have a very rough time at 19).
School creates the logistical problem of getting kids to and from school. Again, the bus you're already paying for can take people to a school or a shared learning center or a library or a tutor's office.
The money you are paying to maintain the school science lab can also be spent to support a community science lab. This building can be much smaller, less staffed, and more optimally configured than a full highschool
The money you spend to support a school computer lab can also be spent to support a community computer lab. In general this already exists at most public libraries. The same argument as for the science lab applies here.
The money you spend to support school lunches can also be spent on food programs.
When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, but a hammer is not the right tool for many jobs. Likewise when all you have is a school, every societal need related to children starts to look like a school problem, but that does not mean school actually solves those problems in an efficient way. It really does not take any great mental leaps to imagine services dedicated to solving individual problems being more efficient than something that was never originally intended to solve that problem.
You are casually suggesting restructuring the entire economy while minimizing a relatively small problem involved in that, which is deciding who has access to education and how.
