Education

                        Obsolescence in the Schools


       For decades we have been hearing about all the leisure time we will
     have in the new Communications Age. Perhaps the techno-peasants will, but
     not those at the cutting edge. Why? Because people working in the sunrise
     industries are finding that the rate of change requires them to spend
     almost one day a week just to keep up with what's new. This is especially
     true in computer companies, but also applies in such fields as
     biotechnology and advanced medical services.

       As you look into this phenomenon, it is easy to see why traditional
     educational institutions cannot function in a new environment where
     information travels at the speed of light. Never mind governments that
     are still operating from manuals written in the 1930s and 1960s; let's
     take teachers. In times of little change, it was easy to keep up with
     that change. But as change accelerated, it changed the very environment
     itself. Where once educators had 130 years to learn about, say,
     electricity (after the invention of the electric motor, for example),
     today they have just weeks to learn what's new. The educational system
     isn't structured to handle rapid change. The students are aware of that.

       Perhaps even more important is that those who do keep abreast of change
     just don't have the time to become teachers or even to train teachers. By
     the time that would occur in the old format, the thing they dropped out
     of in order to teach would itself be obsolete. Look at the speed at which
     we went from vacuum tubes to transistors to the microchip to integrated
     circuits to fifth generation artificial intelligence computers. Already
     biological and neural computers are pushing the frontiers of the sixth
     and seventh generation.

       Knowledge is now really worthwhile only if it comes from the cutting
     edge. By the time it is passed on by an obsolete method, it is itself
     obsolete. Virtually anything passed on in print is outdated. Are you
     aware that it sometimes takes eight years to get a textbook into the
     educational pipeline in North America? The book is obsolete the day it is
     written, never mind the day it appears in the classroom, yet we're
     supposedly training kids for the future with this material.

       Many universities are not aware of the speed at which knowledge is
     expanding. The mission statement of the president of the University of
     British Columbia, titled "Toward the Pacific Century: The President's
     Report," published in 1988, stated that knowledge was doubling every
     fifteen years (without citing a reference). A few years after the UBC
     report, the prestigious Futurist magazine reported that human knowledge
     was doubling every twenty months.

       North American schools simply aren't aware of what is happening. Of
     course, there are minute pockets of awareness, but they are minimal, and
     educators with an eye on the future have little opportunity to be heard
     in the rigid higher levels of academia, where the rulers usually are not
     willing to give up their cherished beliefs in the long-gone educational
     dogma of yesterday. Hence, my view that the present educational system
     will not evolve but collapse.

       Only those who learn to dance with electrons will thrive. Many others
     will not even survive. Would you be at your present level of influence
     and affluence today if you could not read or write? You needed to know
     the three Rs of the Industrial Age -- reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic --
     to survive. Today, if you have not acquired the knowledge of the new
     three Rs -- RAM, ROM, and run -- you are electronically illiterate. Our
     schools, instead of preparing students for the future, imprison them in
     the past.