I do not use the word education much anymore. It relates too much to coercion, conformity, classification, and confusion. Learning, a better word, suggests broader scope.

Oscar Wilde once said, "Nothing worth learning can be taught." The North American public education system has had its run. It no longer serves the purpose for which it was designed during the Industrial Age, when change occurred slowly. In our rapidly changing society, learning must also change dramatically. Intricately woven into our environment, the educational establishment, as we have known it, cannot evolve quickly enough before it collapses.

North American industry performed well up to about 1970, in large part because of the educational system. That system fell into disrepute about the time the Information Age blossomed. Defects in the traditional system are daily becoming more apparent.

This deterioration started to show up in North America, the region that profited the most from a system designed specifically for the Industrial Age. Then the defects spread like a virus world-wide, because all jurisdictions were basically following the American lead with systems that were similar.

In Mexico, "the cult of the licenciado" is little different in action and purpose from the procedures of the 15th-century conquistadors. Upper class warrior/priests assumed command, mainly because they were royalty or closely associated with the traditional ruling class. Everyone else followed their orders -- or else. They played rough. Outsiders could enter and survive only by conforming to strict regulations. If successful, they eventually were anointed with permanent rank and power. Class perpetuation was established because they had established the cult of the licenciado, the cultivated class. In a way it is not much different from someone today "owning" a union card, especially one in a teacher's union.

In North America, that same cult was called academia. You followed an established curriculum, acquired patience to sit through what your predecessors had established as dogma, and memorized and regurgitated the same upon command. This provided permanent rank and power. It was and is called "tenure." The licence was called a diploma, a certificate, or a degree. Possession of such pieces of paper implied -- not guaranteed -- that the holders had been approved by peers as the only ones qualified to hold such positions.

Since the governments in North America had bankrolled this adventure, they quickly acknowledged recognition of such credentials and ruled that everyone who wanted government employment had to "earn" such papers. They could not allow their investment in the system to fail. As time went by, hiring fell to brother and sister members of the cult. They made sure that only cult members were hired. Tenure became a right, not a privilege. It became the right to be aloof from accountability and question.

Academics managed, whether in North America or Europe, to defend themselves and their system against anyone who dared question their right to rule. Their right restricted the right of other people, some holding other unreleased qualifications of a newer kind, to work. Canadians still do not qualify, in most circumstances, to move to the United States to work unless they can produce an academic document showing they have been certified in some particular discipline. This rarely applied to journalists because most journalists considered a B.A. degree insulting because good journalists have life experiences not degrees. By exempting journalists, the U.S. government avoided a lot of bad press.

With the self-employed creating the majority of new jobs in the late 1990s, that barrier to the self-employed entering America still has not yet been removed. This is likely because entrepreneurs are creating jobs today in fields that did not exist yesterday. Governments must learn how to operate in the new world and acknowledge the importance of the invisible factors affecting all aspects of life today. Bureaucrats must crawl out of their tunnels and develop broader visions.

An intellectual guillotine will soon chop what was considered mandatory in the past, along with special privileges -- what was becomes not wanted in our radically changing times.

Chaos has moved into education. Most people born in the silicon corridors of cyberspace feel more aware and comfortable today than people born and raised in pre-cyber years. Chaos is another form of ultimate order.

Books take an average of five years to get into the public educational system in North America. For the past 50 years, most revisions to educational curricula and peripheral systems have been carried out by people in the educational system itself. Few have worked.

It is time someone outside the system tries different methods. It is time that accountability, rare in the traditional system, forced clear results. Unless this happens, we should close down the whole show. It would be less painful to simply walk away from it than to endure the slow death already underway.

The Communications Age can allow faster and superior learning at lower cost than the traditional system still in place, and the new system has the potential to produce a much better product than the old.

When my speaking circuit slows down mid-summer and mid-winter, I have time to enjoy the various CD-ROMs, software programs, and research books acquired during my world-wide travels. I always find much more in them the second time around than on the first quick run-through.

One goldmine is the Grolier MultiMedia Encyclopedia, first issued in 1988. The entire, 21-volume encyclopedia fits onto one side of a 4.5-inch CD-ROM. Way back in 1988, I had to explain to people what a CD-ROM was. Today things are different. Everyone knows how useful are the wonders of CD-ROM technology.

The first release of the CD-ROM used 10 million words to explain 33,000 subjects. When it came out, I remember staying up all night, it was so fascinating. At the time, I wrote, "In the tough depression economy of the 'dirty thirties,' and also during the 1940s, some families made a conscious decision to purchase encyclopedias and forego, perhaps some, more entertaining option. Subsequent studies have shown that the offspring of families who made that positive, tough decision reached higher levels of influence and affluence than the children of families who made other choices.

"A computer, comparable to the encyclopedia of yesterday, coupled with this electronic encyclopedia on CD-ROM can provide the speed, content, and incentive for children to reach higher goals than ever before. And instead of being mired in the Gutenberg era of the dull, dry, static print, they are introduced to today's world of electronic communications where sound and colour brighten up the learning process. It's a far, far better world they'll find with this 'intelligence amplification tool' than when I went to school -- one that operates at a speed commensurate with today's rapid action."

These words ring as true today as they did a decade ago. Some of those kids who climbed at an early age onto the bulldozer of change are among the 3,000 millionaires (most under 35) now working at Microsoft. They can also be found all over the planet from Boston to Bangalore doing their thing, still fascinated by it all, and well paid for their efforts.

Bill Gates also saw the potential. Last year his worth at Microsoft increased at the rate of a billion dollars a month. Yes, one billion dollars a montth. One Wednesday in July he made one billion dollars to add to the multi-billions he had already earned. This has never happened before in human history. Think about that. It could be the tip of a new Golden Age.

Earlier today, I researched a column on another new CD-ROM, the third edition of The American Heritage Dictionary from SoftKey International in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its novelty is that it talks.

Why keep telling the details? You are going to be one of the "knows" or you are going to be one of the "know-nots." If you prefer to belong to the first group, buy both the encyclopedia and the dictionary now. Then you may enter the new Golden Age as did the children of the parents who subscribed to encyclopedias during the "dirty thirties."

The literary culture we have known, treasured and enjoyed for the past five centuries, is in its final phase. It can no longer keep pace with the volume or the acceleration of the data flow in the Communications Age.

Almost a decade ago, author O.B. Hardison, Jr., saw this coming in his book Disappearing through the Skylight. I read this book when it first came out, and I recently reread it, obtaining new insights into what I too had been observing over the past three decades. (That is why I wrote my own book, The Last Book You'll Ever Read, and put it all on a 35-cent computer disc attached to the inside back cover.)

Here is one description Hardison gave of how modern technology -- in this case, hypertext -- has already changed the way those now-ancient manuscripts will be viewed in the tomorrows to come. Hardison wrote, "If you imagine a reader using hypertext, you have to imagine a constant movement from text to glossary to grammatical comment to classical dictionary to Bermuda map to textual variants to drawing of Ariel to text of Sea Adventure narrative to...."

If these images were removed from the mind that read the foregoing, they would appear as a jumbled collage, all directly pertaining to the Shakespearean work titled The Tempest. To the digirati, it all makes sense. An elegant order underlies apparent chaos. This collage is created not by the author, but by the reader when hypertext stimulates interest or curiosity. Reading The Tempest in hypertext format is different from reading it in book format or in play form and even from seeing the play on stage or a film version. Interactive hypertext appears, to the techno peasant, chaotic, confusing, and disjointed.

It is up to the reader to pick the path, the interruptions, and the information desired at any one moment. The reader might want details on stage design or audio components, or he may want to check the "talking dictionary" to find out how a word was pronounced back then. He may wish to find out why it all starts with a shipwreck of the Sea Adventure in the beginning, rather than in the middle or at the end.

It does tend to make the "play" disappear. As Hardison points out, "The disappearance of the literary text began in the 19th century with the theory that literature should be studied as science studies nature." Computers create a swamp, reminiscent of a primeval concoction that instead of creating life draws in enquiring minds to a much wider world. However, this is a world from which escape denies the intellectual adventure so much more exciting than anything found in mere print. "Modern culture is taking shapes that are more various and more complicated than the book-centered culture it is succeeding," says Hardison.

This all leads to interactive novels. One of the best by Robert Pinsky, goes from The Faerie Queen and Through the Looking-Glass with the concept that powerful minds leave psychic impresses behind them." The reader can penetrate the minds of various characters to reach the Wheel of Wisdom held in the mind of a pre-human creature.

Try that out in a Gutenberg-format library.