Absolutely, and that's something I'm very grateful for! One of the things I love the most about where I live is the excellent library system, and I have taken a ton of advantage of it. That said, it's not always the best for serious self study, since often books lack answer keys or worked solutions.

I'm not proposing distance ed. I'm proposing that we shape education around automating the rote things, in particular delivering lectures. I don't think the main benefit of being on campus is the lectures or coming up with assignments, instead (as another comment noted) it's the peers and the people you interact with and how they help you learn. And so by automating away the rote part of it and focusing on the creative (research, TAing, peer interaction), it seems like we should be able to create better outcomes.

Why do you think universities still give lectures, as the (contemporary) material has been available in written form for a few hundred years? Thousands of professionals, most of them smart and well-intentioned, have had these choices since the advent of cheap printing. Yet lectures today would be recognizable to the ancient Greeks. Why?

That's a good question. I think two things:

1. High quality video recording and transmission is still relatively new technology, and it seems most lectures are audio visual performances.

2. There hasn't been a push for a paradigm shift. Lectures work well enough, and have lots of benefits like creating a gathering of people. But does COVID change that?

There's a lot of value to paying someone who has spent decades reading all the things people wrote down and distilling the most important information, themes, and principles.

I'm reading The Illiad right now (Pope's version). It's quite nice, but I don't understand it. I mean, I get what's going on, but I don't understand why they are telling me this. Why is it composed the way it is? Why start the last few months into a 10 year war? How does one even successfully camp out in front of an enemy city for ten years? Why didn't someone win already? Why are two enemy combatants duking it out while everyone else watches? Why are they willing to stop when the priests put out their poles saying it's nighttime, battle's over? Why are the priests even willing to go near two people fighting? And that's not even getting into all the literary stuff I'm completely missing.

I have the source material. If I spent enough time reading up on ancient Greek culture, and reading analyses of The Illiad, etc. I'll probably get that. Or I could pay a guy who's already done it to explain all the important parts and point me to the things people have written down that are actually helpful (as opposed to not very insightful, based on obsolete information, pushing an ideology, or just flat-out wrong).