In the Information Age -- an era defined by knowledge workers -- nothing will be as important as education. Yet today's educational system is a creature of the Industrial Age, a factory system for mass-producing minds.
We send our children to huge schools and subdivide them into grades and classrooms. They bring home standardized textbooks and spend much of their time memorizing information that they regurgitate in tests.
They are graded in a way that bears a striking resemblance to factory quality control. All those with less than a certain score are held back for retooling, or they graduate to the next grade level and move on through the assembly line of life.
This system worked brilliantly in the society for which it was designed. Created in the 1800s, it was a perfect fit for the demands of that time. The economy needed workers with certain skills, like literacy and basic math, to work the machines of the Industrial Age economy and participate in democratic public life.
But that same educational system is simply not up to the task of preparing our children -- and us -- for the rigors of the Digital Age.
Ours is an era of nearly unfathomable expansion of knowledge. It's said that about 80 percent of all the scientists who ever lived are alive and working today. The sum total of the world's knowledge is roughly doubling every four years.
Experts devoted to full-time study of their specialties can't keep up with all the cutting-edge developments in their fields. How can we expect that of teachers -- let alone students?
And this is just the beginning. We're only now computerizing our entire society and building an information infrastructure that will push everything into warp speed.
Fortunately, the same digital technologies that are spurring on this knowledge glut can also help provide a way out.
If you want to study how humans naturally learn, watch babies.
Babies and young children have extremely curious, exploratory minds. They figure out the world around them by poking their heads into various corners, picking up what they encounter and trying it out. When they get stuck or bored or satisfied, they move in another direction and start over again.
It's a very individualized process of learning -- one that multimedia computers can begin to replicate.
We've always known that children have a wide range of brain power, but only recently have we begun to understand the great diversity in learning styles. Some kids are more visual; some are abstract thinkers; others learn through association, and so on.
Until now, a teacher facing a class of 30 kids had to decide whether to gear the lesson to the fast or slow kids and to choose the one style of learning in which the whole class would proceed.
Multimedia personal computers, using text and sound and photos and video, hold the potential to tailor lessons to the peculiarities of each individual mind in the room. They'll proceed at that individual's pace and be driven by the individual's natural curiosity.
These new technologies will provide tools to better address the complex learning needs of the modern student.
However, that means the time-honored role of the teacher almost certainly will change dramatically. No longer will teachers be the fonts of knowledge with all the answers that children seek. They can't possibly fulfill that role in the coming era.
Instead they'll be more like mentors or coaches who inspire or motivate the students to find the answers themselves. They'll be problem-solvers who help keep the students moving down their own learning tracks.
The purpose of teaching will essentially remain the same -- but the style will be much different.
The United States needs to invest $112 billion to repair or upgrade the deteriorating physical plants of its 80,000 schools. That's according to a recent report by the federal General Accounting Office.
Forget about it. The new information infrastructure may soon make many of our central school buildings truly obsolete -- not just in need of physical repair.
Multimedia interactive learning will make possible a much more decentralized educational system and will do away with the need to physically gather students in large numbers at central sites. And that doesn't simply mean the rejuvenation of neighborhood schools.
We may see the creation of a very dense network of subneighborhood schools or even block schools where 10 or fewer children gather in someone's house -- like today's day care.
Or it probably will mean much more home schooling. Already, between 500,000 to 1 million American students in grades K-12 stay at home to learn, compared with the 49 million who go off to school. Home schooling has been growing at a rate between 15 to 40 percent a year during the past several years, according to the National Home Education Research Institute.
If learning increasingly takes place through individualized work stations, and if teachers become more like versatile coaches, we will see such hyper-localized learning take off. Small groups of friends or neighbors might want to teach their children within a certain context of religious or social values. Or parents who work out of the home might take a more direct hand in their children's education.
The infrastructure will allow us to tap into the distributed intelligence of the entire society. Real-time video links will allow students to sit in on talks from the best teachers or leading thinkers wherever they are.
Children will still need to be socialized, but that function of today's schools could easily be carried out through alternative methods. Maybe sports teams or hobby clubs or outdoor societies will play much greater roles than they do today.
And don't underestimate how much socializing will be done over the infrastructure -- with children from all over the world.
In the Digital Age, formal education will be more focused on learning how to learn rather than on mastering a specific body of knowledge that will quickly become obsolete.
The emphasis will be on becoming adept at the learning tools, on mastering concepts quickly, on thinking critically, on expressing oneself effectively -- preparing the student for lifelong independent learning.
In a very real sense, our educations will never end. That may mean that our formal education will technically end much earlier than it does now. (Do we all really need the standard 12 to 16 years of study before we're allowed to get on with our lives?)
Or it may mean that we'll maintain lifelong relationships with institutions of higher education -- ones that might not be the same colleges and universities that we look to today. Perhaps we'll never graduate.
Learning will not be so closely associated with educational institutions. We'll probably see a form of "just-in-time learning" at the knowledge workplace, much as we now have just-in-time supply of parts in manufacturing processes.
Digital technologies will allow workers to learn just what they need to know just when they need it. Or the infrastructure will allow them to connect with precisely the right person who knows what to do.
Spending our formal educations learning how to learn does not mean we will all end up being generalists. We'll be learning how to really immerse in certain fields and constantly improve our understanding of them. The mushrooming knowledge and increasing complexity of the Information Age will tend to create more specialization rather than less.
This responsibility for lifelong learning will subtly restructure everything we do as education becomes the center of our lives.
Even our vacations will be seen less as time to flop out on a beach and more as opportunities to learn.
Forget about summer vacation, too. Our current system of summer vacations is rooted in -- yes, that's right -- the Agricultural Age.
The standard three months off in the summer is a throwback to a time when young people were needed on the farms. Despite all contemporary rationalizations, that's the reason we have it.
Most movements toward year-round schooling have come to naught: They're up against tenured professors, teachers unions and others invested in that summer vacation.
But our educational system will soon face extreme social pressure to radically reform or else. Our educational bureaucracy can expect to go through a traumatic restructuring and downsizing as we take advantage of the new technologies.
Those technologies will allow efficiencies and productivity increases that could seriously reduce the number of employees needed. And today roughly 90 percent of the operating budget of the Minneapolis school system -- and other similar systems -- goes to salaries.
Whether we like it or not, Minnesota will have a front-row seat at the restructuring of education.
Minneapolis hosts one of the nation's most prominent experiments in how private-sector ideas can be used to reform public-sector institutions. The management of the city's entire public school system, with its 45,000 kids, has been turned over to a private consulting firm, Public Strategies Group.
We're just beginning to change the educational system, and its eventual shape is largely unknown. At some point, though, we'll have a qualitatively different system.
When will we arrive at that point? Will it be the year 2020? Maybe 50 years from now? Peter Hutchinson, head of Public Strategies Group, has news for you.
His prediction is 10 years.
