What Can You Do?

BRT has posted some commentary regarding tech and education and what it means to be educated. The recent piece in Time adds fuel to the fire in their article titled Class of 2025. Needless to say, it's interesting to say the least.

Reports on what supposedly educated Americans know—and more sensationally, don’t know—come along fairly regularly, each more depressing than the last.

A survey of recent college graduates commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and conducted by GfK Roper last year found that barely half knew that the U.S. Constitution ­establishes the separation of powers. Forty-­three percent failed to identify John Roberts as Chief Justice; 62% didn’t know the correct length of congressional terms of office.

Higher education has never been more expensive—or seemingly less demanding. According to the 2011 book Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, full-time students in 1961 devoted 40 hours per week to schoolwork and studying; by 2003 that had declined to 27 hours. And even those hours may not be all that effective: the book also notes that 36% of college graduates had not shown any significant cognitive gains over four years. According to data gathered by the Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace, half of employers say they have trouble finding qualified recent college graduates to hire. Everybody has an opinion about what matters most. While Bill Gates worries about the dearth of engineering and science graduates, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences frets about the fate of the humanities.

Dumbing down students by improper integration of tech to education, teaching to the test and not demanding excellence in becoming good at something shows just how dazed and confused education is in America and why, in some respects, it's going to get worst because the acceleration of tech and how it relates to education is becoming ever more disruptive 24/7, food for thought as we move further into the 21st century.

• In ten years, the iPad will cost about $10 and be about 5 to 10 times faster then the Cray super computer circa1983. Ditto the smart phone.
• Immersive tech, like Google Glass, is just the start point for 24/7 immersion of humanity to the web, soon be be followed by transparent circuitry embedded in contact lenses, thus setting the stage for integrated Augment Reality environments that will render Glass a relic years before 2025. How does education compete with this?
• IBM, doing heavy lifting into AI with Watson, is now developing systems controlled by the mind, something that will come to pass sooner rather then later.
• The number of jobs will continue to shrink, with humans being replaced by robots on the manufacturing end and AI in the white collar sector. How can education deal with this?
• The need to change priorities in the US is paramount. Defense spending is out of control and the nation is mired in debt, two unsustainable factors that adversely affect education in ways too numerous to calculate. A reset is needed because the US infrastructure is beginning to break.
• The need to analyze exactly what is the tech footprint and how can it be properly integrated into the education space is key. Isolated examples of great success of tech linked to learning can be found throughout the nation but a systematic approach to do this nationwide is sorely lacking.
• Harvard costs a cool $70K with no guarantee of a job because it's rapidly becoming "what can you do?" that matters, not the degree you have, the school you go to or who you know in the fiercely competitive marketplace of 2025. By 2025, $100+ k/year could become the norm. 
• By 2025, higher education will be almost unrecognizable as the 8% inflation rate per year of US colleges is not sustainable nor is the entry fee required to getting a degree from any decent private school, which means, many schools around today will not be in 2025.
• Kids born today, will not know what a computer is as the internet of things will be in full swing by 2025.
• The impact of environmental degradation, global warming and energy shortages will loom large in 2025. Question, does education have the skills to train the young to enable them to make the changes needed by coming up with new and innovative ideas to enable humanity to cope with these enormous challenges? Does government have the capability to do the same? Can America deal with this because at this point in time, ignorance is bliss and happy motoring will live on forever.
• In some ways, the guild system of the 17th century will become alt ed 2025 as knowhow in specific disciplines, driven by tech, will become popular in lieu of boutique colleges costing a $100K/year to attend.
• Kids are starting to design their own curriculums in HS, a trend that will only accelerate as years go by.
• As tech becomes finer grained, the diversification of education modalities will accelerate as one size fits all, as per today's ossified public education doctrine, will no longer apply.
• Kids, in many instances, are smarter then teachers regarding tech and the web though this is beginning to change as young, web savvy teachers replace the technically challenged in schools all across America. 
• Educationally challenged politicians cut state education budgets with abandon, conveniently forgetting what inevitably happens 20 years hence, when the populace in question, no longer has the prerequisite skills to thrive in a technologically driven society.
• Learning by wrote has real value if the knowledge in question relates to the net. For instance, knowing the alphabet and multiplication tables relates as does arithmetic and the proper use of grammar (The Elements of Style anyone? :)) because what happens when the computer or smart phone runs out of power and arithmetic is needed to solve a real world problem like following a recipe or calculating how many square feet of rug is required to carpet a room. 
• Learning to learn is something not often taught in today's schools, something drastically needed due to the double exponential acceleration of tech. Everything is connected and relational. To ignore this fact is true folly.
• MOOCs are taking off while the sense of place regarding the college campus is starting to fray due to the enormous cost of US higher education. In Europe, free college is in the offing if students past a rigorous test proving they have the smarts to get in. In the US, it's becoming the money equation in terms of who gets in.
• Onerous student loans are larger then the CC debt incurred by us rubes, thus making wage slaves of the indebted college students saddled with debt almost impossible to pay off. The question people are beginning to ask is, when do the indebted repudiate the debt. Interesting thought, eh?
• Speaking of place, education is rapidly becoming digital and distributed, where students can gather together online with teachers without the need of occupying or maintaining an expensive space like a high end high school that may cost more then the education that takes place within it. In every way, the linked environment of the web and the tools that leverage it, will continue to grow, how education deals with it, only time will tell.
• Ignorance is slow motion suicide because without education, the ability to discern, make wise decisions and to question the status quo is severely limited. In a tech driven society, ignorance is not bliss.
• If education cannot make the changes needed to succeed, Idiocracy awaits, a dim future where Advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism have run rampant and dysgenic pressure has resulted in a uniformly unthinking society devoid of intellectual curiosity, social responsibility, and coherent notions of justice and human rights. Sounds like today doesn't it?
• Humanities are vital to education as they foster flexibility of thinking and the ability to make connections and create something wonderful from those connections. Creativity is the juxtaposition of two or more seemingly disconnected ideas, i.e. the joke, as the end result of the combination thereof is wholly unexpected. - Arthur Koestler- The Act of Creation

The only constant is change, everything else is irrelevant, something educators around the world are slowly beginning to realize. Learning how to learn is a really good idea as it's a process yours truly has been doing for quite a long time. :)