Democracy & Technology Blog Online Education Revolution is Finally Here (More or Less)
School’s Out, by Lewis J. Perelman, an early Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute, makes the case that education as we know it will end by….well, by about now, the early 21st century. Obviously, it didn’t happen. The book was published in 1992 and is another example of the comment of Disraeli that it is important not only to be right, but to be right at the right time. Perleman’s book probably faded from prophetic influence because its predictions were too sweeping and too advanced. The education establishment was and is too entrenched to yield easily and the public’s habits of genuflecting to prestigious degrees are too ingrained.
VIsionaries often have a difficulty with timing. George Gilder’s 1985 prediction (in Life After Television) that TV and computers would converge was correct, but pre-mature. The changes he foresaw are only happening now, twenty some years later.
Is societal change finally catching up with Lew Perelman’s vision? Only partially. We are nowhere close to abolishing schools and universities, though, thanks to the home schooling movement, we may be seeing some diminution of the prestige of formal education. Ending schools altogether doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s reform agenda now. Nonetheless, I thought of Lew when I heard an NPR segment today giving examples of the ways in which online education is going mainstream at last.
Memo to Lew: being proved partly-right is not a bad score for a prophet! And there is still a lot of validity to your insights of yore.
(Cross-posted at Discovery Blog)