TECHNOLOGY FOR EDUCATION - CAN THE SCHOOLS CATCH UP/KEEP UP? 

During the past two decades schools in North America, schools have failed to move into the rushing river of technology that is sweeping the world. Can schools catch up and keep up?

In our rapidly globalizing world myriad emerging technologies have done wonders for productivity in manufacturing, medicine, biotechnology, science and engineering, just to mention a few of the hundreds of sectors affected by recent change. Yet schools, among the most conservative of institutions, have generally, failed to embrace and accept openly, most of these changes. New jobs, which even schools admit are not like the ones they are training current students for, are waiting for trained workers. In some cases industries have already set up their own schools because present public school graduates aren't aware of what such industries are doing.

The problem is serious. Not only because of the increasing speed of change in new technology but also because the old technology that schools are so familiar with can't keep up. For example, a very good book on this very subject "Technology In Education: Looking Toward 2020", published in the United States and England in 1988 by Lawrence Earlbaum, was, in some ways, obsolete by the time it reached wide distribution.

Changes in storage of information alone have move from advanced micro-fiche, where a printed newspaper page was reduced from full size to little fingernail sizes, to optical storage cards the size of a credit card that hold 20,000 pages of information. Soon thereafter both Grolier and Britannica announced their respective 21 and 29 volume encyclopedia sets were now available on a 4.5 inch compact disc. Tufts University followed with a crystal the size of a sugar cube that held the information equivalent of 10,000 one-megabyte floppy discs only to be outclassed by Cambridge who put the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin. Since the announcement of that old-fashioned development, SERODS appeared on the scene. Surface Enhanced Ramon Optical Data Storage ... CAPABLE OF STORING ONE MILLION 300-PAGE BOOKS ON A 5.25 INCH DISC. A major library that can be held in your hand. The possibilities are more than teachers have been trained to comprehend.

This is just one field -- perhaps an extreme -- but such change is occuring everywhere. Any new breakthrough makes everything the new change affects obsolete overnight. Even in new fields, like those that could offer graduates fantastic opportunities just a few years ago, have changed so radically in mere months that workers have to be completely retrained in an even faster-moving field.

For example, in 1978 Digital Equipment Corporation of Maryland, built the VAX 780 minicomputer. It was one metre high, one metre wide and two metres long. It cost $30,000 to manufacture. Six years later the same company came out with a microchip, the size of a fingernail that cost $300 to make. It replaced the VAC 780. The highlyskilled, highly-paid workers that produced and serviced the VAC 780 were no longer required.

Change, like death, can come on swift wings. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.

Does this mean we should all give up? Of course not, but it does mean that the old ways, the expensive ways, no longer work. They can be replaced by dramatic changes in personal perception and thinking. It is happening in other places on the planet. There they are no smarter than we are, but they have realized that nothing will ever again be like it was in the past. In many cases those in these emerging countries didn't have any "good-old days" so it was easier for them apparently to change. Continual crying for these "good old days" won't help. Trying to hang on, trying to pressure governments to support long-dead concepts either in manufacturing, service or even education or government itself, along the same lines as in the past, is a waste of effort, money and time.

We have little time left.

Old information: "Technology in Education: Looking Toward 2020." Edited by: Raymond S. Nickerson & Philip P. Zodhiates. Published by Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, New Jersey and London, England. About $35 in Canada.

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