I have no problem with saying that interpersonal education is not valuable or that interactive dialog is unimportant. What I see as erroneous is assuming that this requires either an institution of higher education or that it be expensive.

There is the presumption that dialog and discussion are only available in a classroom and that this is only avenue to active engagement. This may have been true 50 years ago but it is not now. In this regard your thoughts on education haven't progressed much from Plato. This kind of thinking is exactly why the education system is so expensive and fails so many people.

Besides, even Plato didn't equate education with being expensive. When Plato first led the exact kind of engaging discussions we are talking about at the Academy there was no cost involved.

But even more, we are 24 centuries beyond Plato and are not reliant on simply dry books and fallible people to transfer knowledge from one generation to the next. We've been freed from that primitive constraint for decades.

The identification of online learning as "quick surveys" and "rudimentary forms of interaction" informs me that you probably are not aware of the many of multimodal forms of education that are now possible. And these multimodal forms are not one way like they would have been even 50 years ago.

I myself worked on and built interactive, dynamic, and collaborative education systems for a very large company's leadership development program 20 years ago. These were far from primitive even 2 decades past. We have only advanced in capabilities since then. That is not even considering the AI advances of the last two years.

When you talk about engagement as measure of effectiveness these systems can go far beyond what even active questioning by and simple dialog with a teacher can achieve. We are now in the realm of participatory active simulation. We have multiple perspective, multi culture participatory dialog that spans the globe.

Additionally these systems encourage much broader participation at a deeper level not only by lowering the barrier to entry by removing time, distance, and monetary constraints, but also by reducing the inherit and unavoidable confrontational nature of teaching methods such as the Socratic method while avoiding disengagement that arises from lecture based teaching.

While the Socratic method can be effective and is even enjoyable to some, it is unapproachable and a nonviable means of effective education to people who are confrontational avoidant or are otherwise neurodivergent.

But thankfully we no longer live in a world where that is requirement or even where that is the best form of learning. Education theory has advanced very far in 24 centuries and technology in the last 50 years has brought an even more rapid change and ability to unshackle education from the constraints of the University based system.

In fact this very conversation illustrates the point exactly. We are not in a university, we are are not in classroom and having a dialog and this conversation has zero cost and is imparting information and education to anyone who choose to read it and participate from anywhere in the world.