Are Schools Redundant?

The (almost) always provocative Bob Cringely has a must-read post up on his site about how technology is de-legitimizing the very foundation of schooling.

"...we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools."

This has a ring of truth to it and ties in with an insight delivered recently by (I think) Stephen Fry: academia has been based on the notion that facts are scarce. Hence they must be memorized and otherwise preserved. But in an Internet world facts are easily copied and aren't scarce anymore. Google makes them easy to locate. As Cringely puts it farther on in his posting it's not longer a knowledge economy, it's a search economy.

The big question is (i) is this true and (ii) if it is true, what does it mean for us as teachers?