When Will Education Become Outdated?

By Ryan Joseph

The teaching process has changed quite a lot over the past centuries. In the ancient Roman society, children were simply taught by their parents and the boys were brought up learning the trade of their father. In colonial America, children were generally either taught at home or in small, one room schoolhouses. Public education as we know it today has only been around for the last century or so. Even today, education is undergoing rapid changes. Homeschooling is on the rise, as are alternative education options like online learning and small charter schools. What will it look like in another 100 years?

Will education itself ever become obsolete or unnecessary?

I read an article not that long ago discussing standardized testing in a country other than the US. A student at one of the tests was discovered to be cheating by receiving messages on his Internet connected wristwatch. Since then, all watches have been banned from testing sites. Similarly, in the US, students are already not permitted to bring a dictionary or cellphone to the SAT. Other standardized tests in highschool do not permit students to bring calculators.

On one hand, this makes sense. Students should be able to demonstrate that they can do long division without a calculator, or recall historical facts without Googling it…shouldn’t they? On the other hand, however, where in the real world will they be anywhere without a calculator? Or without Internet access? Personally, I can’t remember the last time I worked out a complicated math problem on paper. It’s too easy to just press a few buttons and get an answer.

So what do we do once computer chip implanting becomes widespread? The day when you merely need to twitch your eyes a few times to use a calculator are not very far away. Look at cellphones…the world’s first cellphone call was placed in 1973. In just over 30 years, we have reached saturation, with almost every single person in the US carrying at least one phone. Once visual implants are introduced, it will likely take less time before they become just as mainstream as cellphones are today.

What will happen to standardized testing then? What will happen to education? Will there be any need to even learn long division if you have a calculator implanted in your brain 24 hours a day?

Here’s something else even more interesting. The head of Britain’s Independent Schools Council recently predicted that students will be able to download information straight into their brains, Matrix style, within the next 30 years. That makes you think even more, doesn’t it? Not only will we someday have the ability to access outside information right from our brains, we will be able to download information (like how to speak a foreign language) directly into our brains. Can you imagine how this will change current education? College education could very easily go from a 4+ year experience to less than 1 year with lesson downloading happening during the first month, and real world practice for the rest of the year.

It’s clear that education reform is on the verge of an explosion. It’s already a topic that’s on a lot of people’s minds. We continue to try to modify the existing system to fit new technologies, but we’re rapidly approaching the time when technology will modify the existing system so much it becomes unrecognizable.

I’m sure there will be people who doubt such technologies will ever become reality. There are others who will say that, even once these technologies are mainstream, they won’t be able to replace traditional education. I will agree that book knowledge, however valuable, cannot replace real world experience, and for that, we will likely always need experienced people to teach unexperienced. But for topics like math and foreign language, or even real world skills like car repair, knitting, or computer programming, an instant brain download would be perfect.

As with any new technology, there are also bound to be people who completely reject it simply because it goes against the grain. At the risk of sounding crass, though, like all the previous technological advances, once the generation of doubters grows old and dies, the advance will be embraced and eventually taken for granted.

There are downsides, of course. Anyone who read Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdomknows what the main character went through when all of his chip implants went offline. He was forced to learn how to do things the old fashioned way and all of his friends had to slow down for him since he was no longer connected to the grid, so to speak. Whenever humans become overly dependent on technology, the potential for disaster increases. But is it worth it?

Personally, I’m definitely looking forward to the new educational advances that are on the horizon. If the previous few hundred years are any indication, we are due for a big change in the educational arena. Will these changes make things better or worse? That will likely be up to our children and grandchildren to decide.