“The wise one knows what time it is,” a Zen proverb goes. Maybe the
people who have been peddling the hoax of education reform just don’t know
what time it is. Maybe the folks who have been haranguing us to “save our
schools” just don’t understand that the classroom and teacher have as much
place in tomorrow’s learning enterprise as the horse and buggy have in modern
transportation. Maybe they don’t see that for the twenty-first century and
beyond, learning is in and school is out.
Imagine, for instance, that it’s near the end of the nineteenth rather than
the twentieth century. A national task force on “excellence in horses” has
issued a report exclaiming that America is “at risk” because its horse
breeding and training are afflicted by a “rising tide of mediocrity.”
Russian, Japanese, and German horses, the report warns, eat more oats, pull
heavier loads, and can run faster and farther than American horses. Since
everyone knows that the horse is essential to agriculture, transportation,
industry, and the military, it’s obvious that an all-out effort is needed to
raise the quality of U.S. horseflesh if America hopes to be competitive in the
twentieth century world.
Oh, by the way, the task force suggests, since the “horseless carriage”
seems to be becoming pretty popular, all horses and their trainers should take a
course in “automobile literacy” so they won’t be scared by the noise of
these curious contraptions.
Imagine that America’s chief executive dubs himself the “equestrian
president,” and that he gathers all the U.S. governors together to establish a
set of national goals aimed at assuring that the “New American Horse” meets
“world class standards.”
Imagine, too, that top business leaders, instead of investing in Ford and
Delco and Goodyear, and instead of lobbying for paved roads and traffic lights
and parking lots, put millions of dollars into “business-stable partnerships,”
“wrangler-of-the-year” awards, and “break-the-mold” horse breeding
demonstrations.
As ridiculously shortsighted as this sounds, it accurately reflects how
technologically blind the past decade’s costly and futile education “reform”
movement will appear to future historians. For a technological revolution is
sweeping through the U.S. and world economies that is totally transforming the
social role of learning and teaching. This learning revolution already has made
the “classroom teacher” as obsolete as the blacksmith shop. In its
aftermath, most of what now passes for education “reform” will appear as
useful to economic security in the 1990s as the Maginot Line was to military
security in the 1940s.
The idea that the evolution of computer and communication technology might
spell the end of the industrial era is now over twenty years old ──
the terms “information age” and “postindustrial society” go back to the
sixties. What has been less widely appreciated is that the recent information
age has been only a transitional period, a prelude to the new historical epoch
that should be more accurately labeled the “knowledge age.”
A bevy of technological ripples unleashed during the past few decades is now
merging into a tidal wave of new technology. The knowledge age economy it will
spawn will be mobilized not merely by automation but by intelligence, and will
be filled not just with information but with comprehension.
Because knowledge is the steel of the modern economy ──
the essential commodity all else depends on ──
learning has become the strategically central enterprise for national economic
strength that steelmaking was in the industrial age. As a result, the nations
that stop trying to “reform” their education and training institutions and
choose instead to totally replace them with a brand-new, high-tech learning
system will be the world’s economic powerhouses through the twenty-first
century.
Contrary to defeatist rhetoric about America’s “lag” in schooling, this
is a global race that has not yet begun; a race that is not merely for narrow
competitive advantage but for global prosperity and peace. It is a race that
America is better positioned than any other nation to lead. But an array of
backward-looking policies ── on
communications, employment, investment, and technology, as well as education ──
has squandered the opportunities the learning technology revolution offers,
slowing our economy to a drift and threatening to sink it altogether.
Perhaps they will call this “The Great Bamboozlement” ──
those future historians, looking back on this moment from the prospect of a
century or more from now, when they ponder how so many business executives and
politicians and just plain people could have been so misled by a cabal of
would-be education experts and self-appointed reformers.
The reformers tell us the “future” is the millennial year 2000. And so we
get a bevy of America 2000, Omaha 2000, Colorado 2000, and Podunk 2000 projects
that aim to get schools ready for a vision of the future that is glued to the
rearview mirror. The redoubtable year 2000 was the future in 1950; now it’s
got about as much futurity to it as last Thursday. The reformers act as if they
believe The Future is going to arrive eight years from now, and then change will
just stop and society will sit on a plateau of blissful continuity for the next
century.
Maybe we’re so shaken by the upheavals of the last couple of years that, at
heart, we long for a pause, a few tranquil decades to catch our breath. But
there’s no rational reason to expect that. Dickens described the period of the
French Revolution as “the best of times and the worst of times.” The same
could be said of today, and now as then, that ambivalent intensity of the tidal
waves of great revolutions is bound to ripple through the world for at least a
century to come.
So if we really want to prepare ourselves and our children for “the future,”
we need to be thinking about the world of 2030, 2050, and beyond. Does that
sound farfetched? You think that’s too “futuristic” to have any meaning to
you today?
Ponder this. In America today, there are babies alive now, babies bouncing on
fathers’ knees, babies nestling in mothers’ arms, who will be alive in the
year 2100. That’s not a typo ── I
mean 2100, not just 2001. And we’re not talking about just a handful of babies
but thousands. There are several hundred 108-year-olds in the U.S. today, and
with our larger population and further advances in medical science, it’s
virtually certain that several thousand of today’s children will live right on
through the next century.
So if you’ve touched a baby lately, you may well have touched a resident of
the twenty-second century. That future is alive now, and it’s worth thinking
about today.
“War has become too important to be left to the generals,” French premier
Georges Clemenceau observed. Similarly, learning has become too essential to the
modern economy to be left to the schools.
Generally knowing next to nothing about science and technology, most
education reform leaders tell us that technology is just a sideshow, that
education is an eternal institution, and that reform requires doing more of the
same only better.
The reality is that a new generation of technology has blown the social role
of learning completely inside out:
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Learning used to be a distinctly human process. Now learning is a
transhuman process people share with increasingly powerful artificial networks
and brains. Even today, expert systems and neural networks are being “trained”
by human knowledge engineers; the machines’ automated expertise in turn is
providing “just-in-time learning” for car mechanics, power plant operators,
and a growing legion of other workers.
#
Learning was an activity thought to be confined to the box of a
school classroom. Now learning permeates every form of social activity ──
work, entertainment, home life ──
outside of school. For what piano lessons would cost, you now can buy an
electronic piano that will teach you to play it. Only a quarter of American
adults know how to program a VCR; a new model will teach you how in any of six
languages. The fastest growing cable TV networks ──
The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel ──
are devoted to learning. Of the more than sixty million Americans who learned
how to use personal computers since 1980, most learned from vendors, books,
other users, and the computers themselves, not in schools.
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Learning was presented as the result of instruction: a linear,
hierarchical process in which an “expert” teacher would pour knowledge into
the empty head of an obedient student. With knowledge doubling every year or so,
“expertise” now has a shelf life measured in days; everyone must be both
learner and teacher; and the sheer challenge of learning can be managed only
through a globe-girdling network that links all minds and all knowledge.
#
Learning or education was a task of childhood in preparation for
entering adult life and work. Now learning is literally the work of the majority
of U.S. jobs and will be what virtually all adults ──
whether employed, unemployed, or “on welfare” ──
will do for a living by the early years of the twenty-first century.
I call this new wave of technology hyperlearning, or just HL for
short. It is not a single device or process, but a universe of new technologies
that both possess and enhance intelligence. The hyper in hyperlearning
refers not merely to the extraordinary speed and scope of new information
technology, but to an unprecedented degree of connectedness of knowledge,
experience, media, and brains ──
both human and non-human. The learning in HL refers most literally to the
transformation of knowledge and behavior through experience ──
what learning means in this context goes as far beyond mere education or
training as the space shuttle goes beyond the dugout canoe.
These facets of the hyperlearning revolution are not Star Trek
projections but are events happening now. We have the technology today to enable
virtually anyone who is not severely handicapped to learn anything, at a “grade
A” level, anywhere, anytime.
But this technological revolution inevitably must be matched by a political
revolution: The very power of modern technology to liberate learning leaves no
role for the sprawling empire of academic bureaucracy other than self-serving
protectionism.
At its root, this technological revolution puts learning and education on a
collision course. The essence of education is instruction ──
something some people do to other people, usually with required “discipline.”
The word pedagogy comes from a Greek verb meaning “to lead,” and
education itself is from the Latin word meaning “to lead forth” ──
both imply the active leader herding a flock of passive followers. But the
essence of the coming integrated, universal, multimedia, digital network is discovery
── the empowerment of human minds to
learn spontaneously, without coercion, both independently and cooperatively. The
focus is on learning as an action that is “done by,” not “done to,” the
actor.
Moreover, twenty-first century technology does not merely permit such an
explosion of learning beyond the crypt of the classroom. The whole modern,
knowledge-based economy depends on constant, universal learning for its own
prosperity and further development.
This reality has been not only ignored but completely convoluted by the
backward-looking vision of what passes for education reform.
The reformers have told us that American education is failing, that our
schools have fallen behind the schools of other nations, and that the mission of
reform is to catch up to their higher standards.
The truth is that, taken as a whole, for the purposes of a pluralistic and
egalitarian society, America has the best education system in the world. And
even if that assertion is debatable, in any case the issue of whose education
system is “best” has become historically irrelevant.
In 1912, Britain’s White Star Line boasted the safest, fastest, glitziest,
and overall best passenger steamship in the world. And the Titanic
unquestionably was the best ──
from the day she was launched to the day she sank.
Sometimes being the best isn’t good enough.
Even with improvement, the technology the Titanic represented had only
a limited future. By the time Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in 1927, it
was clear that the trans-Atlantic passenger ship was doomed to eventual
extinction no matter what “world class standards” it might meet.
Marketing guru Theodore Levitt once noted that people do not buy quarter-inch
drills because they want quarter-inch drills ──
they buy quarter-inch drills because they want quarter-inch holes. This
simple logic has been aborted by an academic empire that has mystified the
public into paying more and more for “the best” bitless drills and
forgetting about the holes altogether ──
at a time when modern technology offers new ways of making holes with lasers or
chemicals that require no drills at all.
So contrary to what the reformers have been claiming, the central failure of
our education system is not inadequacy but excess: Our economy is being
crippled by too much spending on too much schooling.
Reform is a hoax. The “new, improved” education it is trying to sell us
as an economic savior is really a solid gold life jacket: It glitters for
attention. It’s outrageously expensive. And the longer we cling to it, the
deeper it will sink us.
The principal barrier to economic progress today is a mindset that seeks to
perfect education when it needs only to be abandoned. The prime determinant of
not only America’s but the world’s economic future will be the speed with
which hyperlearning is developed and opened up to universal access. Thwarting
these advances are tradition-bound educational policies that reinforce monopoly
and bureaucracy while stifling competition and innovation.
The hyperlearning revolution demands a political reformation. And that
requires completely new thinking about the nature of learning in a radically
changed future that now sits on our doorstep.