After a brief hiatus, I’m back to the Economy 4.0 series. It’s a truism that building our human capital — educating and training our citizenry — is the single most significant challenge that Virginia faces in the early 21st century. In the latest column, I take it for granted that our efforts to date have been largely unsuccessful. Expensive… very, very expensive… But not terribly effective. Compared to national norms, the educational achievement of Virginia’s students has barely budged; compared to international norms, the achievement of American students is slipping.
As I’ve argued before (See “The Tofflers on Education“), American educational institutions evolved to meet the requirements of the agricultural and industrial eras of development. Unfortunately, we have reached a stage of such institutional ossification — a gridlock of unyielding special interests — that our educational institutions are incapable of evolving to meet the demands of the knowledge era.
One reason we cannot bust this institutional gridlock, I believe, is the inability to imagine what a knowledge-era educational system might look like. I don’t pretend to be an expert in this field, but I do have some ideas — or seeds of ideas — of how a post-industrial education system might change. In this week’s column, “Education for the 21st Century,” I suggest that we’ll eventually see the following:
- The end of age segregation in schools. No more age cohorts marching in lockstep through 12 distinct grades. Each child will progress at his or her own pace.
- The end of nine-month school years. Why should children waste three months out of the year? To help their parents with the harvest? The time off is mostly wasted. Children need to spend more time learning.
- The end of “schools” as distinct buildings or campuses were education takes place. Home schools (or collaborations of home schoolers) and distance learning will show the way.
- The rise of free-lance teachers and professors. Teachers and professors valued for their ability to teach (as opposed to publish) will find the freedom to connect directly with parents and students without the intermediation of schools and colleges.
- Just-in-time education. The divisions between “school years” and “work years” will blur, as people learn what they need to learn, when they need to learn it and apply it. Instead of acquiring high school degrees and college degrees, which are increasingly meaningless credentials, people will acquire the competencies, skills and knowledge they need to perform on the job or pursue their self fulfillment.
Unless the process is blocked by the educational-industrial complex, the logic of evolving technology and the demands of the marketplace make these changes more or less inevitable. The real question is whether we ultimately build an educational system for the 21st century in the 21st century, or whether the process of institutional change is so slow that we won’t get there until the 22nd century… if then.