10. CLOSING THE TECHNOLOGY GAP: BEYOND PSEUDO-INNOVATION

  1. Had the power of educational technology (not in some laboratory but in common use) grown at the same pace over the last four decades as the power of computer technology, a high school or college diploma-which still take twelve and four years respectively to produce, at an average cost for either of more than $60,000-could be "produced" in less than five minutes for less than five cents!
  2. The point is not that the world should expect instant education for a nickel tomorrow. While human factors still limit such instant learning, the fact remains that schools and colleges are almost totally isolated from the information revolution that is so explosively transforming every other venue of human affairs. This comparison demonstrates that the technological gap between the school environment and the "real world" is growing so wide, so fast that the classroom experience is on the way to becoming not merely unproductive but increasingly irrelevant to normal human existence.
  4. THE R&D GAP
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  6. Education researcher Myron Lieberman estimates the dollar value of the time that college of education faculty claim to devote to research at roughly $300 million a year. But precious little of this so-called "research" has any relation to the basic science and technology of learning.
    [Perelman's footnote at this point is to a piece in Education Week by Myron Lieberman, which you can see by clicking here. You can also click here for a Response to Lieberman by Michael Kirst, Thomas James, and Lee Shulman]

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  8. As meager as $50 a year for education's per-employee R&D investment appears, it's instructive again to recall that the student is the "worker" whose productivity matters most in the education business. So the education sector's annual R&D investment per worker realistically is something less than $5-a thousand times less than the norm for other major industries, and ten thousand times less than the amount spent by the most competitive U.S. firms in high-tech, information businesses.

  9. That is not to say that the U.S. education sector could or should spend exactly as much on R&D per learner-as-worker as the top computer software companies-that would total over a trillion dollars a year. But an increase in learning R&D on the order of a hundred times would narrow an inexcusable chasm in R&D investment down to a plausible difference.

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  11. If there is good news in this dismal situation, it is that-quite to the contrary of education lobby propaganda brooding about America's mythical "lag" in the global school wars-the United States does not trail behind other nations in closing education's disastrous technology gap. While specific data on national investments in educational R&D are scarce, the available information suggests that academia in other nations is as resistant to innovation and productivity as it is in the United States. So America is not yet losing the race to transform educational technology to match a knowledge age economy-if only because there is no race, so far. More important: The whole world is losing the precious opportunity for growth, prosperity, and freedom that hyperlearning offers by failing to invest in the learning technology needed to run a knowledge age economy.