Yeah, I've enjoyed this conversation; it's provided impetus for some much needed study of ed history on my part. I think you're right in seeing the importance of free public schooling's rise; that's certainly a significant historical shift. I still question the association between this shift and industrialization, though, as it seems to me that free, compulsory education was becoming well established by the 20th century. For example, Wikipedia reports that "by 1870, every state provided free elementary education," and that "By 1900, 31 states required children to attend school from the ages of 8- to 14-years-old." And those schools, I think, were just as likely to insist upon timely lesson completion as their 20th-century counterparts (indeed, wasn't the sort of draconian strictness of these schools exactly what the Progressives would later react against?)

So I still don't see a connection between industrialization and and teaching responsibility. But I do think that it'll be interesting to see how the new connectivity affects authority. There's a lot to like about the idea of a new, Illichian, distributed and free learning environment, and some reason to think the internet could bring it about. But of course for every cyberpunk vision of network freedom there's a competing Orwellian one of inescapable corporate and government surveillance and control (if you wanted to be provocative, you could say this is already reflected in the growing gulf between the LMS and PLE ways of doing things...) Time will tell.