Will technology replace schools?

Will technology replace schools? May 30, 2011

Stephen Pearstein profiles Sal Kahn, who teaches math via YouTube videos, making the case that online technology may soon make traditional schools obsolete:

If education moves to a teaching model in which students learn through online tutorials, exercises and evaluations created by a handful of the best educators in the world, then how many teachers will we need preparing lesson plans and delivering lectures and grading quizzes and tests? Surely we’ll need some for one-on-one tutoring, or to run small group discussions, or teach things that can’t or shouldn’t be taught online. Despite assurances to the contrary, however, there’s likely to be fewer than we have now — fewer but better-paid with more interesting jobs — just as has happened in nearly every other industry that has gone through a similar transformation.

The disruption doesn’t stop there. If students are allowed to progress through each subject at their own pace, they won’t be second-graders or sixth-graders any longer, since at any time they are likely to be at different grades in different subjects. Indeed, the whole notion of a 45-minute “class,” or the six-hour “school day,” or even the August through June school “calendar” — the entire framework of the educational experience — will become somewhat irrelevant. And as Khan loves to point out, grading will suddenly become simple: Everyone gets an A in every course, with the only question being how long it takes each student to earn it.

Given these implications, you can understand why the education establishment has been in no hurry to embrace a digital future. The battles over standardized testing and adoption of common national standards were just the warm-up. Now that the opposition to them has been largely overcome, capital and creative talent will pour in to develop both the hardware and the software of the new education technology.

Over the next decade, look for teaching to be transformed from an art into something much closer to a science, look for learning to become highly individualized, and look for education to go from being a cottage industry to one that takes full advantage of the economies of scale and scope. And as in every other industry, look for quality to go up and cost to go down.

via Steven Pearlstein: Mark them tardy to the revolution – The Washington Post.

The corollary is that schools would be replaced with homeschooling!  But don’t working parents want someplace to park their kids for the day?  That reason alone will is likely to keep schools alive, even after they are obsolete.

I do think that human-to-human teaching is much superior to mechanical instruction, but some online teaching–such as  my daughter’s Latin classes for homeschoolers are real time, with genuine teacher-to-student and student-to-student interaction–whereas many of our progressive schools have become mechanistic and dehumanizing.

What do you think about this?  What could it mean, say, for Christian and parochial schools?

HT:  Jackie

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