Our North American educational system could be far better than it is. But can the present system be fixed? The system has been modified and changed at least for 125 years. But these small and large corrections haven't done the trick. I believe our educational system will collapse before it evolves. It's time for constructive destruction and a fresh start.

Some say that's just too expensive, yet we send aid to Latin America and pay teachers here $50,000 a year to teach Spanish. (Spanish is now the fourth language in Vancouver. French is the fifth.) Why not pay Guatemalans $25 a week directly and have their whole family teaching your whole family the language? Via the Internet, you can now hold global video-conferencing sessions for $1.00 an hour. So you send a workable, used $300 computer (available via ads in Buy & Sell newspapers) to your instructor in Guatemala City and provide aid that isn't charity.

CNN, the Cable News Network, now reaches 200 countries, and half a billion people watch it daily --intensely. Why does North America require 50,000 geography teachers, and similar numbers for other subjects, when one or two of the best in the world, with a support staff like the one that backs up Ted Turner's organization, can teach the world for far less than the half a trillion dollars now spent annually on education in North America. We'd better start now, before CNN starts up the "The CNN Learning Network."

It can be done, at least with some classes. One British company is making small chemistry sets in which small amounts of chemicals along with a video permit children to handle safely the exciting mysteries of chemistry (the kit doesn't include enough chemicals to blow up anything). One CNN knowledge navigator could be standing by (live on camera), inside an active volcano, to pass on the similarities.

We must become more creative -- actively learning, not passively absorbing regurgitation from the ancients, is the best system for our modern world. Fortunately, efficient new low-cost technologies are paving the way everyday.

We can by-pass the fields of the techno-peasants by daring to be different.

Ever wonder about Rip Van Winkle?

I do, a lot.

What changes would he notice had he slept for 500 years rather than just 20? First, a tap on my Macintosh mouse to bring my Guinness Encyclopedia into play to see what he saw the first time. I tap my mouse again to review The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, site of the Rip odyssey, written in 1820 by Washington Irving, the first American author to capture a world-wide audience.

With that information my imagination can roam. In my awake-dream Rip falls asleep shortly after Johannes Gutenberg produced what is believed to be the world's first book printed from moveable type: the Christian Bible, Protestant version, in Latin, in Mainz, Germany just before 1456.

My Rip goes to sleep then and does not awake until 1996, five years before start of the Third Millennium on January 1st, 2001. What does he recognize? Only two things appear vaguely familiar. A school and a church. All other feudal institutions are gone.

Schools and churches are still dispensing virtually the same ideas in the same manner as they did when he went to sleep. To his surprise he discovers that unlike the excitement that accompanied the original Gutenberg products, people today seem disinterested in what both church and schools have to say.

Rip soon finds himself wrapped up in the many things happening in the 1990s. In fact, 99.5 percent of all he sees is new to him. His 20th-century friends say, "That's not new; it's been around for a month." Rip is astounded minute-by-minute by radio and television, movies, musical CDs, computers and books on computer discs. But these discoveries are shadowed by CD-ROMs that hold not only a whole encyclopedia, but 3,500 distinct books containing stories, plays, poems, religious works including the Bible, the Koran and Buddhist writings on one tiny 4.5-inch disc that will save building a shelf the length of a football field, to hold all this in the old form.

It's the Library of the Future, but it's here now! The disc also contains historical and scientific documents, some children's books and works of Shakespeare. Then he discovers that soon 10,000 books will appear on one disc! What will they think of next? A trip to a new library really bowls him over. This huge, interesting building holds one million books and documents. It all fits on a new disc coming out soon! It's overwhelming. "How will I keep up?" he wonders.

He visits a new friend, Walter, and finds out he watches TV transmitted via his own personal satellite dish. He has two, one large and one small, which bring in different programs from everywhere, in many unfamiliar languages. Walter even makes direct phone calls to a colleague on the other side of the world from a small case he constantly carries when he travels. It also contains a streamlined machine called a fax that sends letters everywhere. Yet no paper flies out of the machine -- except when someone writes Walter and then their letter flies in and is printed right in this small case. It must be magic! It seems as mystical as the holy miracles of the Middle Ages.

Toilets, kitchens, skyscrapers, bridges, highways and machines that fly into the sky and even into outer space all astound him. So many changes in such a short time! After all, he only slept for 500 years. He remembered stories as a child about brave Portuguese and Spanish sailors who traveled to strange lands on boats powered with cloth sails, and returned with spices, silk and gold. Such adventures didn't happen that often. But never anything like this! So much, so new, so fast. Would this cornucopia of riches ever stop?

When friends suggest that 90 percent of everything Rip now sees will be obsolete within a decade, he is skeptical. "How can I absorb all this?" he asks.

"Simply swim boldly in the new world of information," experts advise. "Broaden your horizons. Learn to think differently." That old idea of having an individual fixed point of view is gone forever. With constant change, a point of view becomes impossible. Learn to walk on quicksand and dance with electrons and photons."

"Easy for you to say," Rip replies. And he falls asleep, exhausted, and dreams of his simple past.

I hope he does not sleep another 500 years.

For far too long we have been told that we must maintain a teaching environment so our youth can prepare for the work that they will find when they graduate from school and/or university. We have tried to do that, universally and democratically, for 100 years. It worked in the Industrial Age. Now that age has passed. Concentration on brawn and mechanical skills is fading. Today knowledge technology and the photonic are important. Learning actively by participation and personal searching is replacing learning passively from teachers.

Most things of importance today are invisible or just on the verge of being glimpsed. Teachers like to teach things that are visible and traditional, and today's textbooks reflect that bias. These textbooks are obsolete the day they are printed. It takes about three years to research, write, and print a textbook, then another two or more years to get it "approved" or "adopted" or "listed" for the curriculum requirements of educational institutions. These books are supposedly used to teach kids about the real world that they will enter. This is a world that MTV has dominated for 10 years. Now, really!

With a few clicks on the mouse that is connected to the computer on which I am writing, I can be in interactive contact with somebody or some data bank in almost any city in the world. At almost no cost, I can access the information I want to know. Isn't that what and how our youth should be learning? I've been doing roughly this for the last 18 years, and it seems every year to grow easier and cheaper.

The workplace has changed, the world has changed, the demand for certain skills has changed, and the demand for increased knowledge workers has changed. So why do we keep producing the same obsolete products? If our schools were factories, they would have been closed 10 years ago for the same reason. They are not producing a saleable product!

To check this column on my computer, I don't even have to read it myself. My built-in-robot (her name is Ezmerelda) will read it aloud to me -- in female, male, or robotic voice. She will even fax it out to the world at high speed after I have gone to bed -- when phone rates are cheaper, if I tell her so. She always checks my columns for spelling errors. Humans can no longer "just do" for a living. They now have to "think for a good living."

According to recent figures, in 1950 only 50 percent of jobs called for higher thinking. By the year 2000, it's suggested that the figure will increase to 85 percent. The future is not going to be simpler. It is going to be more complex.

For the past several decades our schools have taught the belief that "profit" is a dirty word. We are about to cash in on that training by watching as our dollar turns into confetti, by having so many self-chosen unemployables saying things like "I won't work for that multi-national" or "I hear if you work for them you have to be on time every day."

Way back in 1987, education journalist George Radanski reported that the dropout rate across the country was 30 to 35 percent. "Soft education" has proven to be soft in the head. Fifty percent of graduating students have a diploma devalued more than the Canadian dollar. Why is this so? By allowing "choices" instead of standards, many ex-students now have only a smattering of knowledge that is useful for earning a living. Those who didn't drop out just "dropped in" for the company and for chances to "score." Fifty to 85 years ago that worked, as long as you had strong arms and a hard head. It won't work today.

It will probably take us a decade or two to catch up to where we should have been. To do this our schools will probably have to extend the school year by a full third -- by adding another 60 days! Think that's tough? That's been the Japanese standard for years. Perhaps that's why they can do so much. The average Japanese student, attending school from kindergarten to Grade 12, has studied for 16 to 13 of our school years.

The moral is as follows: Forget "teaching." Start "learning."