Book Larnin'

For the last three weeks, Bob Cringely, a tech industry insider who knows how to think a couple of steps ahead and will explain it to you, has been futzing with the ideas of the education system to come. Read the first one, and click on through, especially to Amish Paradise.*

Our current American education system is still woefully modeled on industrial revolution strategy, which has benefits, but some notable drawbacks.

The benefits are in efficiency. Sticking all the kids in one place and drilling them all with the same bore of info (pun intended) is not ideal, but you'll get more children educated more consistently--together, under a professional's guidance--that way than you will leaving every child's education up to every set of parents.

However, portable, inexpensive, wireless information delivery obviates nearly everything about the current educational model. And as Cringely points out, in this model, school will not ever end. Nor should it.

"School" as a discrete concept might end, though. If you had a perfect little infofaucet with you all the time, would you stop using it, and learning from it? I might turn it off occasionally, but I wouldn't take it off.

I think Cringely's skies look unnaturally blue. We will still need human mediators, and it is good and right to have them. However, technology is changing our relationship with information, and all the principals in all the world, confiscating all the cell phones they find, will not change it.

The only thing that could seriously dent this future is large-scale disaster: economic collapse, environmental catastrophe, war on native soil. If one of those happens, we'll be glad to have a low-tech backup. But we can't bank on that. We need to plan for good, and expect it. And a plan to overhaul the education system is an excellent part of that program, already in progress.


*I'm not interested in giving up many of my "English" ways, but the Amish do a number of things very, very right. I would trade off some of my modern conveniences in exchange for the discipline, humility, and craftsmanship of the Amish. In fact, there might not be an option.