“There is one thing worse than not being able to see; being able to see and having no vision.”
- Helen Keller

What is the Information Age?

There have been four major socio-economic epochs or ages in the history of human civilization. These ages are defined by the primary activity that humans engaged in during the respective age.

How Does the Information Age Differ from the Industrial Age?

The Information Age is characterized by the value of information, rather than raw materials and physical labor. For example, one of the main products of the Industrial Age is the automobile. Sixty percent of the cost of an automobile is due to the raw materials (e.g., steel) and physical labor needed to produce it. This is in sharp contrast to one of the main products of the Information Age - the computer. Only two percent of the cost of a computer is due to the raw materials and physical labor needed to produce it. What are you paying for? The information (software and patents) necessary to produce it. In the Information Age, information - not raw materials and physical labor - is power.

What Does this Mean for Real People?

Here are some startling facts:

• More information was produced in the last 20 years than the previous 5,000
• Information is doubling every 4 years
• A typical weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than a person would encounter in a lifetime in the 17th century
• 80% of new jobs require sophisticated information handling skills
• Jobs that involve the Internet pay about 50% more than jobs that do not
• Artificial intelligence is expected to affect 60-90% of all jobs in organizations--augmenting, displacing, or eliminating workers
• In the next five years, 80% of workers will be doing jobs differently from the way they have done them over the past 50 years

Thus, to survive, individuals, organizations, and nations must acquire, analyze, and communicate information more quickly than their competitors.

What Does this Mean for Education?

Our current education system is based on outdated concepts leftover from the agricultural and industrial ages.

Simply put, our education system has not kept up with the changes in our socio-economic system during the twentieth century.

Moreover, this trend is predicted to continue. By the year 2010, 96 percent of U.S. workers will work in the information and consumer services sectors. This has had a negative effect on the performance of our education system. For example, the more outdated our system becomes, the more money we have to spend just to maintain the same production.

This is especially troublesome when the cost of high school dropouts is computed. It costs about $100,000 to graduate a student from high school, but it often costs much more not to.

• The U.S. has about 500,000 dropouts per year

• Dropouts are 6 times more likely to end up on welfare

• Dropouts are 3.5 times more likely to go to prison

• 83% of prisoners are high school dropouts

• The U.S. currently has about 2,000,000 prisoners (about 1,660,000 are dropouts)

• Every prisoner costs about $25,000 per year in maintenance

Moreover, the national costs of the U.S. education system during the twentieth century have steadily risen.

Since many politicians and citizens know these numbers, it is clear that demands for increased economic efficiency and productivity will drive education change in the Information Age.

What Would An Up-To-Date Education System Look Like?

An up-to-date education system should be consistent with our current socio-economic system, which means it should be based on concepts from information and consumer services.

This means, among other things, that the new education system should rely more on computers and the Internet and less on textbooks and lectures. The Internet is a very democratizing agent because it makes more information accessible to more people than ever before in the history of human civilization. In addition, free access for everyone is available at libraries and other public places.

Most importantly, the Internet will increase both the quality and the productivity of education.

How will the Internet Increase Education Productivity?

A comparison of productivity (output per worker) and quality trends amongst education, agriculture, and industry during the twentieth century is quite revealing. Education (i.e., instructional) productivity is measure by the student to teacher ratio; the more students per teacher, the higher the productivity. The student to teacher ratio has declined from 37 to 1 in 1900 to 17 to 1 in 2000.

This decrease in education productivity during the twentieth century is in stark contrast to the increase in productivity in agriculture and industry during the same period.
 

Why did agricultural and industrial productivity, but not education, increase in the twentieth century? Technological advancements made the difference.

• Agriculture - 20th century technological innovations included Irrigation, Chemicals, Tractors, etc.

• Industry - 20th century technological innovations included Automation, Robots, etc.

• Education - No technological advances in the 20th century (books and lectures dominated the entire century)

Investment in technology allowed agriculture and industry to reduce labor costs and increase productivity. Note that the current budgets of educational organizations are dominated by labor costs (i.e., teacher salaries) as compared to the typical business organization.

As an illustration, since 1980 banks have replaced 90% of their human tellers with ATM machines and online banking. This has resulted in considerable gains in productivity. A human teller can handle 200 transactions a day. An ATM can handle 2,000 transactions a day and an online bank can handle millions of transactions a day, while never taking a single day off.

Investment in education technology (i.e., computers and the Internet) will lower education labor costs by allowing each teacher to teach more students which increases the student to teacher ratio and thereby increases education productivity.

How Will the Internet Increase Education Quality?

Education quality is measured by student learning and consumer satisfaction. Multi-sensory active learning (e.g., media rich, interactive web pages) results in:

• 50% more learning (all subjects, all grade levels) (gifted, regular, special education)

• longer retention and at a higher cognitive level

• 40% less time to learn the same amount of material

• better student attitudes, cooperation, independence, and individualization

It should also be noted that the current education system is not very learner friendly.

• 88% of the current school day is spent listening to the teacher talk and/or reading textbooks

• 75% of students are not good at passive learning (i.e., listening to the teacher talk and reading textbooks)

• a typical student receives less than one minute per day of individual attention

Currently, nearly 1 billion people are using the Internet and that number is growing daily. In addition, computers are selling at a rate of 3.1 computers per second worldwide. Thus, it is clear that consumers love computers and the Internet and that demands for increased quality via education technology will drive education change in the Information Age.

It sounds crazy - more students, more learning, fewer in-class hours - but that is precisely what happened to industry in the twentieth century.

Productivity and quality both increased dramatically despite the average number of hours worked per week being cut in half. The moral is that productivity and quality are not antithetical. Rather, they are interdependent and the twin keys to educational improvement.

How Should the Transition to Internet-Based Education Begin?

The first step is to buy or lease computers and connect them to the Internet. Note the price trends below.

Computer prices have been decreasing by a factor of 10 every decade since they were invented in the 1950s while textbook prices have been increasing by a factor of 2 every decade since the 1950s. Assuming these trends continue, in 2015 a computer will cost $10 while a textbook will cost $200. The average U.S. school currently spends $200/student annually on textbooks and paper. If this money were spent on computers, U.S. schools could give every student a new computer every year. Total Cost = $0.

The second step is to create an online curriculum. This can be accomplished by using free online materials (currently available at all levels for all subjects) and by using teachers and students to find and create online materials as part of their workload/assignments. Total cost = $0.

The third step is to rearrange the schedule so that teachers have the time to find and create high quality online materials. Double class size (to 34 students per teacher which is still less than what is was in 1900) and give every teacher one-half day every day for training and finding/creating online materials. Remember, teachers will only be guiding students who need help with a high quality online curriculum, so they should be able to handle that many students. Total cost = $0.

The fourth step is to train the education workforce because technology training increases productivity 30%. Free training materials are available online. Total cost = $0.

In summary, the total cost of the transition to an Internet-based education system is $0 and every year it gets more and more costly to maintain the old textbook-based system. In addition, this transition can be gradual and voluntary so that the disruption to the education workers is minimal.

So far, this plan will not cost the education system anything, but it does not save any money either. The fifth and final step is to double class size again (to about 68 students per teacher) and reduce the number of teachers by half (thus, reducing the percentage of the budget devoted to labor to less than 50%) while maintaining the half-day every day for all teachers to find and develop curricular materials. This step must wait until the Internet-based education system is mature (the technology is acquired, the online curriculum is functional, the schedule is adjusted, and teachers are fully trained) and an automated Internet-based record-keeping system is in place. Again, this reduction in the number of teachers can be gradual by relying on voluntary resignations and retirements. In a typical year, about 6 percent of the nation's teaching force leaves the profession, so this step can be accomplished in less than a decade.

It should be noted that, given the increasing necessity of lifelong learning (and the concomitant increase in the total number of potential learners) in the Information Age, this plan will not result in a reduction in the total number of teachers in our workforce. So, even though each teacher will be teaching more students, the increased number of adult students will offset any reduction in the total number of teachers (though who and how they teach will surely change).

Conclusion

The existing educational establishment will resist the transition to Internet-based education, just as they have resisted other technological innovations in the past.

• "Students today can’t prepare bark to calculate their problems. They depend upon their slates which are more expensive. What will they do when the slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be unable to write."
   - Teachers Conference, 1703

• "Students today depend upon paper too much. They don’t know how to write on a slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves. They can’t clean a slate properly. What will they do when they run out of paper? "
   - Principals Association, 1815

• "Students today depend too much upon ink. They don’t know how to use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the pencil!"
   - National Association of Teachers, 1907

• "Students today depend upon fountain pens. They can no longer write with a pen and nib (not to mention sharpening their own quills)."
   - PTA Gazette, 1941

However, human civilization has already entered the Information Age. Our education system will inevitably follow. Even a blind person can see that.