I think we’ve had a good run, but Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal insists humans can flourish in an increasingly machine-centric age if we exploit software and such to overhaul our education system, a process stuck not only in the twentieth century but the nineteenth as well.

It is shocking that in 2015 we haven’t utilized computers to reduce the teacher-student ratio to 1:1 or video games to make education more fun as well as more effective. Mims writes that Silicon Valley figures, now with children of their own, aim to bring algorithms to the academic setting. One idea that seems too good to pass up is real-time textbooks.

An excerpt:

At the core of the coming revolution in how schools should function and what classrooms should look like is this simple observation: It is a waste of time to ask teachers to deliver information and test students on it when that task can be reassigned, at least in part, to software.

Countless startups are working on this problem, among them Testive, which produces a cloud-based service to help students prepare for college entrance exams.

“We need to just unburden the teacher from having to disseminate content,” says Testive Chief Executive Tom Rose. “It’s such a reductive way to use a person.”

That machines can be better tutors than humans, in certain circumstances, is a hypothesis with a great deal of intuitive appeal, though data to prove it remain largely anecdotal. That hasn’t stopped schools all across America from adopting “blended learning,” in which traditional instruction is mixed with lessons delivered on PCs and tablets.

But the vision of many entrepreneurs in educational technology is to take those systems to a whole new level.

“The idea that everyone gets the same textbook is a ludicrously archaic idea,” says Jose Ferreira, chief executive of Knewton, a software company that uses adaptive learning to decide exactly which lessons and problems to deliver to students. “In the future, everybody is going to have materials—textbooks, games, whatever—in a materials portfolio that updates in real time, that generates in real time, based on what you know and how you learn best.”•