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Electronics and the future of education Andrew Odlyzko AT&T Labs - Research amo@research.att.com Preliminary draft, March 29, 1997. Will electronics lead to a much smaller and less expensive educational establishment, as some hope and others fear? My expectation is that it will not, and that the share of the economy devoted to education will continue to grow. The prediction of growth in education is not based on denying the value of modern technology. PCs and the Internet are much more useful than earlier technological innovations such as radio or movies (which some enthusiasts had expected to revolutionize education, just as today computers are predicted to do). Personally I am skeptical of the extreme claims for modern technology. I suspect that Sumerian scribes of 5,000 years ago might feel at home in today's classrooms because education is primarily a process of getting students to absorb new ideas and ways of thinking, and that it requires extensive social interaction. Replacing clay tablets first by paper notebooks and now by PCs can help, but not much. However, that opinion is not a crucial part of my argument. Let us accept all the claims of advocates of modern technology. Suppose that future 3-dimensional holographic projections and high bandwidth networks could make distance learning so effective that live lectures could be phased out. Even then, I expect teachers would still be employed to provide interactive instruction. Their ranks would grow, not shrink, even though they would not be presenting lectures, and even though computers would be used more extensively and effectively than now for interactive instruction. Technology can replace some teachers in their present roles. Hence if all we cared about was to produce what the current system does, we could indeed operate with fewer people. However, we are unlikely to do that. New demands will arise to take up the slack. There has always been desire for more personal attention from teachers than could be met. Further, as the need for training increases, those demands will be rising. Education is not a matter of getting to where the Joneses were 10 years ago. It is more a matter of trying to get to where the Joneses are likely to be 10 years from now. The basic argument is illustrated by the example of business travel. Salespeople for video and voice conferencing services have plenty of testimonials from customers, verifying great savings from elimination of physical trips. However, have travel budgets decreased? They have not. Airplane travel has increased, as has usage of the phone, fax, and email. International business trips from the U.S. have gone up by 20% in the last 6 years [Miller]. Trips are shorter, possibly because email and fax allow for better preparation for meetings, but there are many more of them. Why has there been no decrease in business travel? Some trips have indeed been avoided, and in a static world that would have led to less travel. However, our world is anything but static. The same technological, economic, political, and social developments that have brought us email, fax, and inexpensive jet travel have also brought us world-wide competition, outsourcing, and partnerships that span the globe, which demand more coordination. Furthermore, as competition decreases the differences between the leaders [Gould], while the payoff to the winner increases [FrankC], the pressure is to take advantage of everything possible. The value of catching your partner's, competitor's, or customer's body language might be hard to quantify. Still, when the difference that decides between success and failure is miniscule, won't you try to position yourself or your group to gain any advantage you can, even if it means a 20-hour flight to Singapore for a half-hour meeting? Measurable differences between competitors are decreasing, so human elements are growing in relative importance. "[R]elationship building has become the mantra for corporate honchos" [Sager], as well as for lower-ranking employees. The computer industry leads in relying on convention
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