Ray Ravaglia was burning CD-ROMs in 1991 that cost $45 each. The hardware to create them cost $4,000. The software license was another $3,000. He was building what would become the first online AP Calculus course, back when explaining "online education" took five minutes of confused conversation.

"These days you'd say something like 'online learning' and they'd get it," Ravaglia tells me. "It's been really fun to see something that was so on the fringe become so mainstream that it's hard for people to imagine it being any other way."

But here's the twist: After 30 years pioneering online education—from those expensive CD-ROMs to founding Stanford Online High School—Ravaglia has concluded that technology was never the point. In fact, technology might be the least important part of online education. It's a conclusion he's explores in his book "Bricks and Mortar: The Making of a Real Education at the Stanford Online High School" and his Forbes education columns, where he regularly challenges Silicon Valley's assumptions about learning.

The Promise That Failed

The promise of ed-tech was seductive: Technology would democratize education. Any student, anywhere, could access world-class instruction. Self-paced learning would let kids accelerate past artificial grade levels. The geography lottery would end.

In the early days at Stanford's Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY), Ravaglia believed this too. By 1995, they were offering a complete mathematics curriculum from kindergarten through undergraduate level, all delivered through cutting-edge technology. Students could move at their own pace, access content anytime, and learn from anywhere.

"We thought individualized, self-paced learning was the future," Ravaglia explains. "Students could accelerate for a while, but then they would lose interest and drift away."

Even gifted students—the ones everyone assumed would thrive in self-directed online learning—were dropping out at rates north of 30%.

But the students weren't the only ones drifting away. Ravaglia discovered something even more troubling about the teachers in these asynchronous programs: "Our instructors would do everything they could to optimize their efficiency. They'd build up libraries of answers to common questions. They could whittle their job down to something that could be done in three hours a day."

Then comes the punchline: "And then they would quit."

Think about that. Teachers had optimized their jobs to require minimal effort. They'd solved the problem of scale. They'd removed all the inefficiencies of traditional teaching. And they hated it so much they quit.

The Stanford Online High School Experiment

In 2005, Ravaglia made a decision that seemed to go against everything Silicon Valley believed about education technology. When he founded Stanford Online High School, he made it synchronous. Students would have to show up at specific times. Teachers would have to teach live. Classes would meet together via video conference, even if students were scattered across the globe.

It was, by tech standards, a step backward.

The results were immediate and shocking. "Once we moved to a synchronous environment, attrition dropped [from 30%] to around two to three percent."

From 30% to 3%. Not through better technology. Not through gamification or AI or personalized learning algorithms. Through the simple act of requiring humans to show up and interact with each other in real time.

"At the end of the day, education is about relationships—with each other, with your professor," Ravaglia explains. "If you're not forming those relationships, it's not going to be enjoyable. The technology has to enable connection, not interfere with it."

The Star Trek Test

Ravaglia has a thought experiment that perfectly captures his philosophy: "If we had Star Trek-quality transporters—if we could beam kids into a seminar room, conduct class in person, then beam them home—we would do that. We don't have transporters, but we have video conferencing that can approximate that human connection."

Notice the framing. Technology isn't the goal—it's a compromise. We use it not because it's better than human interaction, but because it makes human interaction possible when physics gets in the way.

This is heresy in Silicon Valley, where disruption is religion and human teachers are just another inefficiency to be automated away. But Ravaglia has data that most ed-tech evangelists don't: three decades of watching what actually works.

Fire Your School

Perhaps the most radical thing Ravaglia tells me has nothing to do with technology. It's about power—and it connects directly to what open education advocates have been saying for years.

"I wrote an op-ed called 'Fire Your School.' The message was simple: Don't view schools as authorities you owe something to. You're fundamentally their employer. If you're not happy with what they're providing, make demands. And if you don't see the changes you want, go somewhere else."

This isn't libertarian ideology. It's practical advice from someone who's watched too many families accept mediocrity because they didn't realize they had options. Whether you're considering homeschooling, microschools, hybrid learning, or online education, the principle remains the same: parents need to take ownership of their child's educational design.

"If people demand options and alternatives, those options will appear," Ravaglia argues. "If the market need is there, the market will create alternatives."

Starting with the Desperate

Ravaglia's first students at Stanford Online High School weren't choosing between online and traditional school. They had no good options at all.

There was the family running a medical practice in rural Idaho whose son was mathematically gifted—the parents would have had to shut down their business and move to give him an appropriate education. Another family had a mother running a medical practice in remote Idaho while the father worked as a blacksmith; their son eventually went to Harvard, but without online education, he would have been stuck with no advanced math options.

"These were the non-consumers," Ravaglia explains, borrowing Clayton Christensen's term. "They weren't comparing Stanford Online High School to Phillips Exeter. They were comparing it to nothing."

This pattern appears throughout education innovation: Start with families who are desperate for alternatives, perfect the model, then expand to those with choices. It's exactly what's happening now with the explosion of homeschooling and alternative education models post-COVID—families who never imagined leaving traditional school suddenly became "non-consumers" overnight.

Why AI Won't Save Education (But Might Destroy It)

As we discuss artificial intelligence, Ravaglia offers a framework that's both obvious and profound: "AI is a tool. If you're someone who actually has something you're trying to accomplish, AI strengthens you—it's another tool in your arsenal. But if you're someone else's tool—if your existence is purely subordinated to helping someone else accomplish their goals—then you should worry."

The teachers who quit after optimizing their jobs to three hours? They'd become tools of the system. The teachers who stayed despite the demands of synchronous teaching? They remained human beings in relationship with other human beings.

For students, the implications are clear: "If you give someone an essay prompt and just take their essay and mark it up, that's malpractice now," Ravaglia states. "You need to see the process. Show me your intermediate steps, your prompts if you're using AI, how you integrated it. Or go back to blue book exams where students write longhand for an hour."

The goal isn't to fight technology but to ensure students develop genuine capabilities rather than just learning to be efficient operators of AI tools.

The Bottom Line

After 30 years and two successful online schools, Ravaglia's conclusion is both simple and radical: Education is about relationships. Technology can enable those relationships or destroy them, but it cannot replace them.

"Access without relationships will unravel," he says. "The relationships are what preserve, sustain, and keep education moving forward."

Every few years, Silicon Valley rediscovers education. They're going to disrupt it, transform it, make it efficient. They're going to replace teachers with tablets, lectures with videos, schools with apps. And every time, they fail for the same reason: They're solving the wrong problem.

The problem isn't access to information. It's not even personalization or pace. It's connection. It's mentorship. It's the irreplaceable experience of one human being caring whether another human being learns.

Ravaglia learned this the hard way, through three decades of trial and error, millions of dollars in technology, and thousands of students. His journey from burning $45 CD-ROMs to running world-class online schools reveals a truth that the next generation of education entrepreneurs will have to learn all over again.

Or maybe that's not a tragedy. Maybe that's just very, very human.

Ray Ravaglia founded Stanford Online High School and serves as Vice Chairman of Dwight Global School. He is author of "Bricks and Mortar: The Making of a Real Education at the Stanford Online High School."

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