A few decades ago, most of what you needed to learn to be productive in society was best learned at a university. Today, most of the what you need to learn to be productive in society is best learned on your own, online, for free. There are exceptions but 99% of human knowledge is no longer locked up within a university.
This knowledge hasn't been locked up for decades, though. It's been possible since at least the mid-20th-century to self-teach yourself the standard material in any major field, at least at an undergraduate level, by going to a library and reading, from the introductory textbooks up through the advanced ones. There are some things that might be hard to replicate (e.g. getting hands-on chemistry lab experience), but you could certainly self-teach the equivalent of a 4-year program in mathematics or history or theoretical physics.
A few people even did. In mathematics it's not that uncommon to find self-taught people, though it still isn't the norm. But overall not many people do it. Why will people do so now? Just because the material can be accessed without going to a library? Given that it takes some effort to work your way through a 4-year physics program, was the effort of going to the library to pick up Griffiths/Feynman/Landau really the main bottleneck?
I can definitely buy some change on the margins and in poorer countries (people who had no access to a library), but I'm confused why the internet will mean that people who for decades have not been teaching themselves physics, despite the books being available, will now do so.
Yes, Christensen in The Innovator's Solution talks about people buying products to get the jobs done that they want to do - we can consider a library and the internet as products, to get the job done of education.
He notes (p.94) that many companies tried to use the Internet to reshape the textbook industry, by supplying more content. But, he says, the job most students are really trying to get done "is pass their courses without having to read the textbook at all". These companies were trying to help students do something that they were trying not to do. He imagines a hypothetical "cram.com" would be more successful.
Most people (not all) find self-study extraordinarily hard - how many things have you, dear reader, set out to study but not completed? I think the only ones I have managed are when I'm using a textbook to help me achieve something specific - write some code, build a business, solve some problem. I wonder, is this really "study" or just "use of references"? e.g. Looking a word up in a dictionary is not really "study", to comprehensively master a topic.
It would be incredibly disruptive if someone found a way to make study - giving useful skills - enjoyable and easy. Gameplay seems the most favourable. I don't just mean things like SO-style badges, but like physical sports (games) teach motor-skills, eye-hand coordination, teamplay and strategy. It's like the "purpose" of play is learning. Note that even animals play (e.g. dogs and wolves have a "play bow", that indicates what follows in not a genuine attack).
I don't disagree but I think the quality of free education has dramatically increased with the rise of the Web. You can now consume the audio and video from the top professors around the country for free. You can work through amazing screencasts from anyone ranging from Sal Khan to some of the best Rails engineers in the world. The examples are endless.
So I definitely think the ability to self-educate has been there for a long time (you could make the case that dates all the way back to the advent of the printing press) but I think it's only in the last decade or so that we've had an explosion in the amount of high-quality, free and widely accesible educational material that is available.
This knowledge hasn't been locked up for decades, though. It's been possible since at least the mid-20th-century to self-teach yourself the standard material in any major field, at least at an undergraduate level, by going to a library and reading, from the introductory textbooks up through the advanced ones. There are some things that might be hard to replicate (e.g. getting hands-on chemistry lab experience), but you could certainly self-teach the equivalent of a 4-year program in mathematics or history or theoretical physics.
A few people even did. In mathematics it's not that uncommon to find self-taught people, though it still isn't the norm. But overall not many people do it. Why will people do so now? Just because the material can be accessed without going to a library? Given that it takes some effort to work your way through a 4-year physics program, was the effort of going to the library to pick up Griffiths/Feynman/Landau really the main bottleneck?
I can definitely buy some change on the margins and in poorer countries (people who had no access to a library), but I'm confused why the internet will mean that people who for decades have not been teaching themselves physics, despite the books being available, will now do so.