Excerpt from Schools Out Lewis J. Perelman William Morrow and Co.

, 1992 I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarian ancestors. Thomas Jefferson Prologue: Learning 2100 The wise one knows what time it is, a Zen proverb goes. Maybe the people who have been peddling the hoax of education reform just dont know what time it is. Maybe the folks who have been haranguing us to save our schools just dont understand that the classroom and teacher have as much place in tomorrows learning enterprise as the horse and buggy have in modern transportation. Maybe they dont see that for the twenty-first century and beyond, learning is in and school is out. Imagine, for instance, that its near the end of the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. A national task force on excellence in horses has issued a report exclaiming that America is at risk because its horse breeding and training are afflicted by a rising tide of mediocrity. Russian, Japanese, and German horses, the report warns, eat more oats, pull heavier loads, and can run faster and further then American horses. Since everyone knows that the horse is essential to agriculture, transportation, industry, and the military, its obvious that an allout effort is needed to raise the quality of U.S. horseflesh if America hopes to be competitive in the twentieth-century world. Oh, by the way, the task force suggests, since the horseless carriage seems to be becoming pretty popular, all horses and their trainers should take a course in automobile literacy so they wont be scared by the noise of these curious contraptions. Imagine that Americas chief executive dubs himself the equestrian president, and that he gathers all the U.S. governors together to establish a set of national goals aimed at assuring that the New American Horse meets world class standards. Imagine, too, that top business leaders, instead of investing in Ford and Delco and Goodyear, instead of lobbying for paved roads and traffic lights and parking lots, put millions of dollars into business-stable partnerships, wrangler-of the-year awards and break-the-mold horse breeding demonstrations. As ridiculously shortsighted as this sounds, it accurately reflects how technologically blind the past decadess costly and futile education reform movement will appear to future historians. For a technological revolution is sweeping through the U.S. and world

economies that is totally transforming the social role of learning and teaching. This learning revolution already has made the classroom teacher as obsolete as the blacksmith shop. In its aftermath, most of what now passes for education reform will appear as useful to economic security in the 1990s as the Maginot Line was to military security in the 1940s. The idea that the evolution of computer and communication technology might spell the end of the industrial era is now over twenty years oldthe terms information age and postindustrial society go back to the sixties. What has been less widely appreciated is that the recent information age has been only a transitional period, a prelude to the new historical epoch that should be more accurately labeled the knowledge age. A bevy of technological ripples unleashed during the past few decades is now merging into a tidal wave of new technology. The knowledge age economy it will spawn will be mobilized not merely by automation but by intelligence, and will be filled not just with information but with comprehension. Because knowledge is the steel of the modern economythe essential commodity all else depends onlearning has become the strategically central enterprise for rational economic strength that steelmaking was in the industrial age. As a result, the nations that stop trying to reform their education and training institutions and choose instead to totally replace them with a brand-new, high-tech learning system will be the worlds economic powerhouses through the twenty-first century. Contrary to defeatist rhetoric about Americas lag in schooling this is a global race that has not yet begun; a race that is not merely for narrow competitive advantage but for global prosperity and peace. It is a race that America is better positioned than any other nation to lead. But an array of backward-looking policieson communication, employment, investment and technology as well as educationhas squandered the opportunities the learning technology revolution offers, slowing our economy to a drift and threatening to sink it altogether. Perhaps they will call this The Great Bamboozlementthose future historians, looking back on this moment from the prospect of a century or more from now, when they ponder how so many business executives and politicians and just plain people could have been so misled by a cabal of would-be education experts and self-appointed reformers. The reformers tell us the future is the millennial year 2000. And so we get a bevy of America 2000, Omaha 2000, Colorado 2000, and Podunk 2000 projects that aim to get schools ready for a vision of the future that is glued to the rearview mirror. The redoubtable year 2000 was the future in 1950; now its got about as much futurity to it as last Thursday. The reformers act as if they believe The Future is going to arrive eight years from now, and then change will just stop and society will sit on a plateau of blissful continuity for the next century.

Maybe were so shaken by the upheavals of the last couple of years that at heart, we long for a pause, a few tranquil decades to catch our breath. But theres no rational reason to expect that. Dickens described the period of the French Revolution as the best of times and the worst of times. The same could be said of today, and now as then, that ambivalent intensity of the tidal waves of great revolutions is bound to ripple through the world for at least a century to come. So if we really want to prepare ourselves for the future, we need to be thinking about the world of 2030, 2050, and beyond. Does that sound farfetched? You think thats too futuristic to have any meaning to you today? Ponder this. In America today, there are babies alive now, babies bouncing on fathers knees, babies nestling in mothers arms, who will be alive in the year 2100. Thats not a typoI mean 2100, not just 2001. And were not talking about just a handful of babies but thousands. There are several hundred 108-year olds in the United States today, and with our larger population and further advances in medical science, its virtually certain that several thousand of todays children will live right on through the next century. So if youve touched a baby lately, you may well have touched a resident of the twentysecond century. That future is alive now, and its worth thinking about today. War has become too important to be left to the generals, French premier Georges Clemenceau observed. Similarly, learning has become too essential to the modern economy to be left to the schools. Generally knowing next to nothing about science and technology, most education reform leaders tell us that technology is just a sideshow, that education is an eternal institution, and that reform requires doing more of the same only better. The reality is that a new generation of technology has blown the social role of learning completely inside out: Learning used to be a distinctly human process. Now learning is a transhuman process people share with increasingly powerful artificial networks and brains. Even today, expert systems and neural networks are being trained by human knowledge engineers, the machines automated expertise in turn is providing just-in-time learning for car mechanics, power plant operators, and a growing legion of other workers. Learning was an activity thought to be confined to the box of a school classroom. Now learning permeates every form of social activitywork, entertainment, home lifeoutside of school. For what piano lessons would cost, you now can buy an electronic piano that will teach you to play it. Only a quarter of American adults know how to program a VCR; a new model will teach you how in any of six languages. The growing cable TV networksThe Discovery Channel and The Learning Channelare devoted to learning. Of the more than sixty million

Americans who learned how to use personal computers since 1980, most learned from vendors, books, other users, and the computers themselves, not in schools. Learning was presented as a result of instruction: a linear, hierarchical process in which an expert teacher would pour knowledge into the empty head of an obedient student. With knowledge doubling every year or so, expertise now has a shelf life measured in days; everyone must be both learner and teacher and the sheer challenge of learning can be managed only through a globe-girdling network that links all minds and all knowledge. Learning or education was a task of childhood in preparation for entering adult life and work. Now learning is literally the work of the majority of U.S. jobs and will be what virtually all adultswhether employed, unemployed, or on welfarewill do for a living by the early years of the twenty-first century.

I call this new wave of technology hyperlearning, or just HL, for short. It is not a single device or process, but a universe of new technologies that both possess and enhance intelligence. The hyper in hyperlearning refers not merely to the extraordinary speed and scope of new information technology, but to an unprecedented degree of connectedness of knowledge, experience, media, and brainsboth human and nonhuman. The learning in HL, refers most literally to the transformation of knowledge and behavior through experiencewhat learning means in this contest goes as far beyond mere education or training as the space shuttle goes beyond the dugout canoe. These facets of the hyperlearning revolution are not Star Trek projections but events happening now. We have the technology today to enable virtually anyone who is not severely handicapped to learn anything, at a grade A level, anywhere, anytime. But this technological revolution inevitably must be matched by a political revolution: The very power of modern technology to liberate learning leaves no role for the sprawling empire of academic bureaucracy but self-serving protectionism. At its root, this technological revolution puts learning and education on a collision course. The essence of education is instructionsomething some people do to other people, usually with required discipline. The word pedagogy comes from a Greek verb meaning to lead, and education itself is from the Latin word meaning to lead forth both imply the active leader herding a flock of passive followers. But the essence of the coming integrated, universal, multimedia, digital network is discoverythe empowerment of human minds to learn spontaneously, without coercion, both independently and cooperatively. The focus is on learning as an action that is done by, not done to, the actor. Moreover, twenty-first-century technology does not merely permit such an explosion of learning beyond the crypt of the classroom. The whole modern, knowledge-based economy depends on constant, universal learning for its own prosperity and further development.

This reality has been not only ignored by completely convoluted by the backwardlooking vision of what passes for education reform. The reformers have told us that American education is failing, that our schools have fallen behind the schools of other nations, and that the mission of reform is to catch up to their higher standards. The truth is that, taken as a whole, for the purposes of a pluralistic and egalitarian society, America has the best education system in the world. And even if that assertion is debatable, in any case the issue of whose education system is best has become historically irrelevant. In 1912, Britains White Star Line boasted the safest, the fastest, glitziest, and overall best passenger steamship in the world. And the Titanic unquestionably was the best from the day she was launched to the day she sank. Sometimes being the best is not good enough. Even with improvement, the technology the Titanic represented had only a limited future. By the time Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in 1927, it was clear that the transatlantic passenger ship was doomed to eventual extinction no matter what worldclass standard it might meet. Marketing guru Theodore Leavitt once noted that people do not buy quarter-inch drills because they want quarter-inch drillsthey buy quarter-inch drills because they want quarter-inch holes. This simple logic has been aborted by an academic empire that has mystified the public into paying more and more for the best bitless drills and forgetting about the holes altogetherat a time when modern technology offers new ways of making holes with lasers or chemicals that require no drills at all. So contrary to what the reformers have been claiming, the central failure of our education system is not inadequacy but excess: Our economy is being crippled by too much spending on too much schooling. Reform is a hoax. The new, improved education it is trying to sell us as an economic savior is really a solid gold life jacket: It glitters for attention. Its outrageously expensive. And the longer we cling to it, the deeper it will sink us. The principal barrier to economic progress today is a mind-set that seeks to perfect education when it only needs to be abandoned. The prime determinant of not only Americas but the worlds economic future will be the speed with which hyperlearning is developed and opened up to universal access. Thwarting these advances are traditionbound educational policies that reinforce monopoly and bureaucracy while stifling competition and innovation.

The hyperlearning revolution demands a political reformation. And that requires completely new thinking about the nature of learning in a radically changed future that now sits on our doorstep.