The New Technology: Three Views

The role of modern technology in education is precisely the same as the role of the automobile in the horse economy: replacement. In the knowledge-age economy that will endure from now right through the 21st century, learning is in and school is out.

More education is not the cure to our economic doldrums. Rather, it’s one of the major causes of the malaise. Education has become a lethal savior. Like a solid-gold life jacket, it glitters for attention, it’s outrageously expensive, and the longer we cling to it the deeper it will sink us.

The reason is that schooling–as a technology, as an economic sector, as a way of life–has become terminally unhinged from the real world of working and living. A growing new wave of technology is totally transforming the social role of learning:

• Learning used to be something done only by humans. Now learning is a process humans share with artificial brains and networks that “learn” to adapt their functions to human needs and deliver instruction to people where and when they need it most.
• Learning was thought to be confined to the box of the classroom. Now learning permeates work, entertainment and home life. Some 99% of what the average American now learns in a lifetime is learned outside any classroom.
• Learning was believed to be the result of a linear “teaching” process in which knowledge would flow like wine from the copious fountain of the “expert” professor into the empty head of the obedient and grateful student. But with the volume of information explosively doubling every year or so, personal expertise may last only a few days and is available to anyone who has the telecomputing tools to plug into the right networks.
• Learning meant schooling and schooling was kid’s stuff, to be “graduated” from so that youth could “commence” adult life. But learning is now what “knowledge workers” — already from two-thirds to three-quarters of the U.S. workforce–get paid to do, and it is what virtually all adults will do for a living by the beginning of the 21st century.

I call the new wave of technology that is not only replacing education but transforming the whole modern economy hyperlearning or just HL. Henry Ford’s Model T was not an invention so much as the integration of a set of technical advances in power plants, rubber tires, batteries and other components as well as fuel-refining, production-engineering, employment policies and marketing strategies — a total system that changed not just transportation but the entire fabric of Western society. Similarly, HL represents the imminent integration of skyrocketing advances in the so-called “artificial intelligence” of computers and robotics, broadband “multimedia” communications, “hyper” software needed to cope with the resulting information explosion, and even “brain technology” that is expanding our understanding of how human and artificial brains work.

The atomic bomb, said Einstein, changed everything but our thinking. HL will change everything and our thinking.

To get a feel for the coming economy of hyperlearning, skip the computer-garnished “Classroom of Tomorrow” (which has as much to do with the real future as Disney World) and drop by the service garage of a General Motors dealer who is plugged into GM’s “CAMS” (computer-aided maintenance system). CAMS is a so-called expert system based on computer terminals in each repair bay linked by telephone to a mainframe computer in Flint, Mich. “Expertise” in the CAMS system on how to figure out what’s wrong with your Chevy and how to fix it is distributed throughout this network, which even includes the on-board computer in each GM car. The system is a learning loop: The garage mechanics learn from the computer-based network how to fix your car quickly and correctly the first time. But the new expertise acquired by the mechanics from their real experience with thousands of repairs each day is fed back to be “learned” by the computer expert. Nobody calls CAMS (already trailing-edge technology) “education” or “training” or “school”–learning is the system’s business.

This kind of “hypermated” learning loop increasingly forms the core of nearly every kind of economically productive activity. The London Stock Exchange has replaced legions of shouting floor traders with an automated telecomputing network, following the lead of America’s NASDAQ. The most prosperous farmers today spend more time working with computers than with combines. Political humbug notwithstanding, factory “jobs” are not coming back: They will eventually require as little labor as farming now does. General Electric’s state-of-the-art light bulb factory in Virginia employs a third as many workers as the one it replaced–and none ever touches a light bulb. Each of the similarly few workers employed in Corning Glass’s most modern plants is trained to be able to run every operation in the factory, not to do a “job.” The work mainly is troubleshooting and managing the software of the automated systems that do the actual manufacturing.

This HL revolution cannot succeed through “reform” or “restructuring” of schools and colleges, any more than the horse could be re-trained or even genetically re-bred to become a car. “Break-the-mold” schools can’t and won’t.

Tools, not schools, offer the key to the learning we all need to prosper in the knowledge-age economy. Sure, kids (and some aults) still will need some kind of community centers for care, shelter and conviviality. But buildings are neither necessary nor sufficient for access to hyperlearning.

Public education has become a barrier to economic progress and a threat to social equality. The well-off will continue to get access to HL tools at work and at home no matter what. The $450 billion America is now squandering each year on education is depriving the less-well-off of access to hyperlearning–over 93% of that money is going to pay education’s bureaucrats while only about 1% goes to hands-on tools and materials students can use for learning. A high-school student in a family with a $70,000+ income is about three times more likely to be using a computer for learning at home than a student in a $10,000-income household. Neither throwing more money at futile classroom tinkering nor vouchers for school choice will close that growing gap between the HL-rich and the HL-poor.

The solution is what I call microchoice. It means commercializing, not just privatizing, America’s collective farms of the mind–public schools and colleges–to unleash the power of free enterprise to deliver more, better and faster learning opportunities at ever-declining cost to everyone. In practice, that means replacing government-run and -controlled institutions with electronic “food stamps” for learning. Using modern card-account systems, such micro-vouchers would allow families to purchase the specific products and services for both adults and children to learn whatever they need from whatever sources can serve them best, whether commercial or nonprofit.

The resulting U.S. market for the most advanced and economically essential technology would be bigger than today’s entire world computer industry. HL is thus both the greatest business opportunity since Rockefeller found oil and the indispensable boost needed to resuscitate our languishing economy.