WIRED 1.1: "Hyperlearning" by Lewis J. Perelman: "
Hyperlearning
Would you send your kid to a Soviet collective?
By Lewis J. Perelman
Dear Information Industry Executive:
Could your business benefit from a few hundred billion dollars in new sales? Good. Let's talk.
We all know that the world economy is going through what some call a 'second industrial revolution' as knowledge-based businesses replace production-based businesses at the core of economic activity. In the trenches of this revolution a host of companies are scrambling to capture the high ground of the new multimedia, telecomputing mega- industry that is springing up from the digital integration of many diverse enterprises.
But contrary to what you have heard during the recent election, schools are one of the principal barriers to the growth of not only this new industry, but the whole world economy. Replacing the bureaucratic empire of educational institutions with a high-tech commercial industry will pull the cork out of the knowledge-age bottleneck - opening up an annual market worth $450 billion in the US alone.
Recent campaign rhetoric aside, the real threat posed to our economy by education, schools and colleges is not inadequacy, but excess: too much schooling at too high a cost.
The conventional 'technology' of the classroom is a thousand-year-old invention initially adopted to discipline an esoteric cadre of acetic monks. The institution of contemporary, 'public' education is a 19th- century innovation designed as a worker-factory for an industrial economy. Both have as much utility in today's modern economy of advanced information technology as the Conestoga wagon or the blacksmith shop.
America currently has the most schooled workforce in its history: In the last two decades, the number of college graduates abso"