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EDUCATION: THE BEST INVESTMENT
Great educators have always known that learning is not something you do only in classrooms, or only under the supervision of teachers. Today it is sometimes difficult for someone who wants to satisfy his curiosity or end his confusion to find the appropriate information. The highway is going to give us all access to seemingly unlimited information, anytime and anyplace we care to use it. It’s an exhilarating prospect, because putting this technology to use to improve education will lead to downstream benefits in every area of society.
Some fear that technology will dehumanize formal education. But anyone who has seen kids working together around a computer, the way my friends and I first did in 1968, or watched exchanges between students in classrooms separated by oceans, knows that technology can humanize the educational environment. The same technological forces that will make learning so necessary will also make it practical and enjoyable. Corporations are reinventing themselves around the flexible opportunities afforded by information technology; classrooms will have to change as well.
Howard Gardner, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, argues that different children must be taught differently, because individuals understand the world in different ways. Massproduced education can’t take into account children’s various approaches to the world. Gardner recommends that schools be “filled with apprenticeships, projects, and technologies” so that every kind of learner can be accommodated. We will discover all sorts of different approaches to teaching because the highway’s tools will make it easy to try various methods and to measure their effectiveness.
Just as information technology now allows Levi Strauss & Co. to offer jeans that are both mass-produced and custom fitted, information technology will bring mass customization to learning. Multi-media documents and easy-to-use authoring tools will enable teachers to “mass-customize” a curriculum. As with blue jeans, the mass customization of learning will be possible because computers will fine-tune the product—educational material, in this case—to allow students to follow somewhat divergent paths and learn at their own rates. This won’t happen only in classrooms. Any student will be able to enjoy the custom fit of a tailor-made education at mass-production prices. Workers will be able to keep up-to-date on techniques in their fields.
Every member of society, including every child, will have more information easily at hand than anyone has today. I believe that just the availability of information will spark the curiosity and imagination of many. Education will become a very individual matter.
There is an often-expressed fear that technology will replace teachers. I can say emphatically and unequivocally, IT WON’T. The information highway won’t replace or devalue any of the human educational talent needed for the challenges ahead: committed teachers, administrators, involved parents, and, of course, diligent students. However, technology will be pivotal in the future role of teachers.
The highway will bring together the best work of countless teachers and authors for everyone to share. Teachers will be able to draw on this material, and students will have the opportunity to explore it interactively. In time, this access will help spread educational and personal opportunities even to students who aren’t fortunate enough to enjoy the best schools or the greatest family support. It will encourage a child to make the most of his or her native talents.
Before the benefits of these advances can be realized, though, the way computers in the classroom are thought about will have to change. A lot of people are cynical about educational technology because it has been overhyped and has failed to deliver on its promises. Many of the PCs in schools today are not powerful enough to be easy to use, and they don’t have the storage capacity or network connections to permit them to respond to a child’s curiosity with much information. So far, education remains largely unchanged by computers.
The slowness of schools to embrace technology partly reflects conservatism in many corners of the educational establishment. It reflects discomfort or even apprehension on the part of teachers and administrators, who as a group are older than the average worker. It also reflects the minuscule amounts city school budgets have allotted for educational technology.
The average primary or secondary school in the United States lags considerably behind the average American business in the availability of new information technology. Preschoolers familiar with cellular telephones, pagers, and personal computers enter kindergartens where chalkboards and overhead projectors represent the state of the art.
Reed Hundt, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, commented on this. “There are thousands of buildings in this country with millions of people in them who have no telephones, no cable television and no reasonable prospect of broadband services,” he said. “They are called schools”
Despite these constraints, genuine change is going to come. It won’t happen abruptly. On the face of it, the basic patterns of education will remain the same. Students will continue to attend classes, listen to teachers, ask questions, participate in individual and group work (including hands-on experiments), and do homework.
There seems to be a universal commitment to having more computers in schools, but the rate at which they are being supplied varies from country to country. Only a few countries, such as the Netherlands, already have computers in nearly every school. In France and many other places, although few installations have taken place, governments have
pledged to equip all their classrooms with computers. Britain, Japan, and the People’s Republic of China have begun the process of incorporating information technology into their national curricula, with a focus on vocational training. I believe most countries will decide to make increased investments in education, and computer use in schools will catch up to its use in homes and businesses. Over time—longer in less developed countries—we are likely to see computers installed in every classroom in the world.
The cost of computer hardware gets cheaper almost by the month, and educational software will become quite affordable when purchased in quantity. Already many cable and telephone companies in the United States have promised free or reduced-price network connections to schools and libraries in their areas. For example, Pacific Bell has announced a plan to provide free ISDN service to every school in California for one year, and TCI and Viacom offer free cable to schools in every community they serve.
Although a classroom will still be a classroom, technology will transform a lot of the details. Classroom learning will include multi-media presentations, and homework will involve exploring electronic documents as much as textbooks, perhaps even more. Students will be encouraged to pursue areas of particular interest, and it will be easy for them to do so. Each pupil will be able to have his own question answered simultaneously with the other students’ queries. A class will spend part of a day at a personal computer exploring information individually or in groups. Then the students will bring back their thoughts and questions about the information they have discovered to the teacher, who will be able to decide which questions should be brought to the attention of the full class. While students are at their computers, the teacher will be free to work with individuals or small groups and focus less on lecturing and more on problem solving.