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I once visited an adult education classroom where each student worked at a computer equipped with a fantastic, futuristic laserdisc. As if struck by a lightning bolt from heaven, or at least a really big beach ball, I experienced a revelation: Someday we won’t need teachers standing in front of students.

I’ve known lots of teachers – bitter, retirement-obsessed teachers – so I mostly kept this thought to myself. But the world is changing at a breakneck pace, so let’s proceed with the neck-breaking.

First, a minor point about today’s education: The Iowa Legislature should move ahead with school consolidation.

It’s true that some school officials will end up with a bigger workload. But if our business leaders can manage hundreds of employees and keep restless customers happy, a good school superintendent can probably handle the kids from three or four small towns.

Really, the biggest problem is coming up with decent names for consolidated districts. When you see “AGWSR vs. BCLUW” in print, you’re never sure if it’s a basketball game or a report on genome sequencing.

And no more names like “Interstate 35,” either. If you want to pinpoint your district’s location in people’s minds, choose a feature that’s less than 1,500 miles long.

But consolidation is nothing more than a short-term approach. We have to think way past that. Prediction: Someday, out there where towns shrink and farmsteads disappear, the students of rural Iowa will get all their education at home.

This doesn’t mean traditional home schooling, based on the assumption that the typical adult can pass along civilization’s accumulated knowledge. Come on, the typical adult can barely grasp the concept of Daylight Saving Time.

No, we’re probably headed for something resembling the Florida Virtual School (FLVS). It may have developed because Florida is stuffed with bitter, retired people who would rather share a hot tub with an alligator than pay taxes for education. Still, it seems to work.

Even as the laserdisc went away, the Internet made FLVS possible. The program started in 1997, and in the 2007-08 school year it offered 90 online courses and served 63,675 students. More than 530 full-time teachers and a few adjunct teachers handled the instructional load.

According to an article in the St. Petersburg Times, most of the students use the courses to supplement their classes at traditional middle and high schools, and some are traditional home schoolers who rely on FLVS to ease the burden.

That doesn’t advance my agenda, so look at it this way.

Imagine students jumping right onto the computer each morning instead of wasting a couple of hours per day on a school bus. On icy roads. Surrounded by irritable wild animals with nothing to lose.

Imagine students having the opportunity to work faster, if the facts are clicking into place, or slower, if the intricacies of algebra are overshadowed by daydreams about sports, illegal activities or that perennial favorite, immoral activities.

Of course, there will be disadvantages, too. Young Iowans will spend lonely days staring into a computer screen instead of interacting with human beings. This will prepare them for corporate life. Now, on to the disadvantages.

If these students are truly independent, with no actual school, that means no school plays, no dances, no fight song. No football and basketball games, where kids learn the most valuable lesson that athletic competition has to offer: Whatever goes wrong is the referees’ fault.

So, yes, we will lose some of the things that have made Iowa such a fine place to grow up. But adolescence will be easier for geeky kids who never quite fit in. The ones who will create a high-tech future that will make us all rich and allow us to retire someplace warmer than this.