Change will Come to Education, Too

Reading a collection of essays edited by John Brockman, Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think, on a Toronto-to-Hong Kong flight last week, I ran across a number of gems in terms of brief, insightful pieces by serious thinkers.  Brockman's Edge.com posed the book's title as its question of the year in 2010, and the viewpoints ranged from the-internet-is-completely-rewiring-our-brains (with some neurological evidence) to it-won't-change-anything-because-computers-will-never-think.

The essay that caught my attention most was one by Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus.  Shirky sees the transformations being wrought by the Internet as the latest in a long sequence of innovations that render older technologies obsolete. 

"… you could earn a living in 1500 simply by knowing how to read and write.  The spread of those abilities in the subsequent century had the curious property of making literacy both more essential and less professional; literacy became critical at the same time the scribes lost their jobs."

Shirky goes on to draw parallels to publishing (where it was once important to own the apparatus such as printing press, TV tower, etc.), but where it has become more valuable to create content that might be distributed through a variety of means.  One cam see the same thing happening in medicine, where once-prescribed drugs are now available on grocery store shelves, or in clerical work where ubiquitous and cheap word processors and printers have replaced stenographers and typewriters.  The rendering of the formerly exclusive and rare into something democratic and commonplace is an inexorable effect of human economic progress.

What  Shirky's point illuminated for me is that the same thing is happening right now with school, though he doesn't mention it by name.  The old bricks-and-mortar, sage-on-a-stage model is being rendered irrelevant, and perhaps prohibitively expensive, by technology.  I am not suggesting that school as we know it will disappear--after all, there remains a sizable market for printed publications and some secretaries still have jobs--but that someday soon school as we know it will be a smaller portion of the education landscape.  Providing the apparatus (school) will be less relevant to more and more people.  Creating the spaces and moments--in the real world, in cyberspace, on the job, wherever--for learning to occur will be what adds value.

Another essay in the book, this one by Haim Harari entitled "Harmful one-liners, an ocean of facts, and rewired minds," specifically addresses knowledge and education.

"I'm amazed by how little has changed in the world of education, by whether we like it or not, the change must happen, and it will happen.  It may take another decade or two, but education will never be the same."

And it may not take that long.  I read Brockman's edited volume as a physical book after snatching it off the shelf just moments before boarding my flight.  As a fully iPadded digital immigrant, it still feels good to once in a while hold a book, much as I like the convenience and ease of my Kindle app on the iPad.  For at least another year or two.