The article throws out the baby with the bathwater.
Let's focus on the consumer market for US grades
7-12 and vocational education, especially computing.

For fine arts such as singing, piano, violin, other
instruments in a symphony orchestra, guitar, dance,
painting, sculpture, photography, etc. it appears
that overwhelmingly the way children make progress
is (A) their family has some expertise and
encourages their children and (B) the education is
available in the home, in the church (e.g., for
choir), or from private tutors, e.g., a local piano
or violin teacher. E.g., for violin, consider Ms.
Caroline Goulding as at

http://www.carolinegoulding.com/

Or consider Ms. Alina Ibragimova playing the Bach
'Chaconne' as at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tezau3hlRxs

She's good; the last part of the first D-minor
section is world class work. Tough to believe that
she learned how to do that in a standard school!

For the consumer market for grades 7-12, before a
consumer will devote much time or energy to
education, they need to know that there will be a
'payoff' from official education 'certification'
which mostly means better grades in grades 9-12 or
higher scores on tests of the College Entrance
Examination Board (CEEB), e.g., as at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board

Of course good scores on CEEB tests are useful for
getting into college and getting college
scholarships.

So, really such consumer education has to aim at
existing graded courses in grades 9-12 and/or
subjects tested by the CEEB.

Now we face a hard lesson: Doing well on these aims
is "not a spectator sport", more work than just
watching TV, and a lot of hard work.

For such learning, the first source is the student's
usual school. For more, the student may want some
tutoring. A few students want to do better than
what is available in the school.

For tutoring, here's an approach: Find what are the
more popular textbooks and develop some videos tied
closely to those main books. Then a student who
needs tutoring, or just to get ready for a test on
Monday, could use the videos for just the place they
are in their textbook.

For going beyond what is available in the school, a
student could use some guidance and then the
learning materials. For going beyond, we are really
aiming just at some CEEB tests, in particular, the
tests of the College Level Examination Program
(CLEP) as at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Level_Examination_Program

For the course content, just get some of the best
available textbooks and then maybe have some
corresponding supplementary videos. Some on-line
tests so that a student could 'check their progress'
would be helpful.

E.g., maybe a student wants to do well in calculus.
So, get a book on calculus aimed at the CLEP test in
calculus.

For still more, that is, for an ambitious student in
grades 9-12, just aim at the subject matter tests of
the GRE.

For vocational, the audience of Hacker News the
unique, world class cream of such education. Why?
Because in the US, nearly all education in practical
computing is from self teaching from books, on-line
fora, practicing at a computer, on-line
documentation, e.g., the Microsoft MSDN Web pages,
etc.

Improving such vocational education? Not easy
because it would involve at least writing better
books than the best ones already available from
O'Reilly, Microsoft Press, and many other publishers
and better Web sites, fora, etc. For one company in
education to improve on all those sources is
hopelessly difficult.

So, where do I see a significant startup opportunity
in education for grades 9-12 and vocational
education? I don't. Really, that's good news: The
CEEB seems to have the needed means of
'certification', their tests. Otherwise, get some
good learning materials, commonly just textbooks
although maybe PDFs downloaded from the Internet.

The bottleneck is the work -- no spectator sport and
no royal road. Instead hard work. E.g., look at
the left hand finger tips of Ms. Ibragimova; they
are bent backwards. So were those of Jascha
Heifetz. Why? Thousands of hours of intense
practice. Hard work.

I did some such things: (1) I'm no good at violin,
have too little talent and never practiced nearly
enough, but I did make it through the D-major
section of 'Chaconne' and parts of the rest mostly
via being self-taught. (2) I never took freshman
calculus. The college where I did my freshman year
was not so good and pushed everyone into a 'college
algebra' class a bit beneath what I'd already done
in high school (in the same city as the college but
the best high school in the city -- Dad carefully
selected where he bought his house). So, I showed
up for the tests only and otherwise got a good
calculus book and dug in. For my sophomore year, I
went to a much better college and one that happened
to have a quite good math department and just
started on their sophomore calculus from Johnson and
Kiokemeister, then also used at Harvard. It's a
good calculus book. Did fine: Made As in that
calculus, got Honors in Math, and 800 on the math
subject matter test of the GRE. (3) I continued with
a lot of largely independent study much like I'd
used for freshman calculus, and that background was
crucial for my Ph.D. in Engineering -- really some
applied math. (4) My career has been in applied
math and computing. I've taught computing in two
well-known universities, but I never really took a
course in it and, instead, was essentially
self-taught, as is nearly standard on HN.

One little victory: One Christmas at the farm of my
wife's family, I was upstairs practicing violin. A
bright daughter, about 9, of one of my wife's
sisters came up and watched. So I put my violin bow
in her right hand, showing her how to position her
fingers to hold it (the more natural Russian way
Heifetz used and not the less natural German way!),
put the violin under her left chin, and let her make
sounds. Her mother had been trying without success
for years to get that girl interested in music, but
the next day her father asked me "Now, how much is a
violin going to cost me?". She was a bright girl:
She was at a large, very competitive high school,
the pride of the community, and in her senior year
her parents were surprised to discover that she was
by a wide margin the head of her class. She got
Valedictorian. In college the retraced the steps of
my wife and got PBK. She got her LLB at Harvard and
started at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Bright girl.

So, net, really, just do the darned work, and no
great educational startup opportunity.

For a reader who got this far and heard of the Bach
'Chaconne' here for the first time, here's what it
is: At one point, Bach wrote six pieces for
unaccompanied violin (he did the same for cello).
Three of the pieces he called called 'Sonatas' and
the other three, 'Partitas'. These pieces are
secular, unlike his other ecclesiastical music.
While Bach was mostly a keyboard player, especially
for organ, his violin and cello pieces show amazing
knowledge of violin and cello, even if heavily he
tried to have them play chords more appropriate for
keyboards.

The crown jewel of the unaccompanied pieces is the
last part of the Partita #2 called the 'Chaconne'
which was a old dance form.

A lot of the music is trying to play on 3-4 strings
at once. Those efforts can view as chords sometimes
and just more than one melodic line at other times.
Bach was good at doing such things.

The piece is in three sections, D-minor, D-major,
and D-minor again and is a 'theme and variations'.
The variations have great variety, slow to fast,
calm to agitated, low pitches to high.

The D-major section starts off calm. Soon it is
playing some nice arpeggios with some triplets. The
triplets get to be more and more intense, say,
'insistent'. The end of the section is essentially
the climax of the piece and is the most difficult
section to play. Depending on how it is played and
heard, the last bars can sound like chords or
several melodic lines, each heard before. How to
play the last few notes is up to the violinist, but
Heifetz makes a big climax there and then quickly
moves to the start of the last D-minor section which
can view as some 'cathartic' relief from the
intensity of the climax at the end of the D-major
section.

Due to the use of the chords and the relatively
non-melodic main theme, for a listener the piece
takes some effort to follow well enough to 'like'.

What it all 'means' is for the listener to decide.
But it does appear that something intense and
determined is going on underneath there somewhere.
Playing it is great fun -- parts of it are a great
way to scream out to the heavens the spirit of
humanity or some such.

There is an old joke: At times the piece is played
on guitar. So, at a concert a guitarist in the
audience sat waiting for the concert to begin. With
nothing else to do, he mentioned to the person next
to him "The Bach 'Chaconne' sure is difficult to
play."

The next person was composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco,
known to be a man of few words, who said nothing
until the concert was over at which time he turned
to the guitarist and said, "The Bach 'Chaconne' is
the greatest piece of music ever written." It's my
favorite.

Again, the bottleneck in education is the need for
the students to do hard work. Given that, there's
lots of great music, good violins and pianos,
textbooks, CEEB tests, colleges, universities,
guidance, YouTube videos, etc. With the hard work,
we can soar to the heavens. Without the hard work,
we're stuck in the mud.