If the earth-moving industry were like the education industry, the hand shovel would still be the tool of choice and bulldozers, backhoes, and other machines would not exist. A basic problem with education is that the technology has stagnated. The public school classroom has not changed much in 50 years. Teachers still have live lectures during class, kids still do homework at home. Each teacher's class size is the same as the other teachers' in the school. There's no innovation aimed at dramatically reducing costs and raising outcomes.
The cause for this stagnation is obvious: the education industry is controlled by people who have a strong interest in keeping the education process inefficient and labor intensive. When was the last time you heard a teachers' union or a department of education support a technology that promised to reduce the cost of education and the number of teachers? Instead, the public education industry is focused on making education more inefficient: requiring teacher certification, reducing class sizes, increasing funding, etc.
The most promising recent developments in education have come from outside the establishment. Wikipedia makes it possible to get a fairly good understanding of any subject quickly and for free. Khan Academy features thousands of ten-minute long micro-lectures covering most of the math and science taught in schools through high school along with software to test mastery and help students tutor each other. Flash card sites help students memorize. These are the "bulldozers" of the education industry which will enable one person to do the work of hundreds. These are the technologies which will "fix" education.
The cause for this stagnation is obvious: the education industry is controlled by people who have a strong interest in keeping the education process inefficient and labor intensive. When was the last time you heard a teachers' union or a department of education support a technology that promised to reduce the cost of education and the number of teachers? Instead, the public education industry is focused on making education more inefficient: requiring teacher certification, reducing class sizes, increasing funding, etc.
The most promising recent developments in education have come from outside the establishment. Wikipedia makes it possible to get a fairly good understanding of any subject quickly and for free. Khan Academy features thousands of ten-minute long micro-lectures covering most of the math and science taught in schools through high school along with software to test mastery and help students tutor each other. Flash card sites help students memorize. These are the "bulldozers" of the education industry which will enable one person to do the work of hundreds. These are the technologies which will "fix" education.