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The Future of Education: A Message from 1967
How far has school really come in 30 years?
by Stephen Peters

Public education in America. Frustrating isn’t it? You open the newspaper and the Portland Public Schools are in turmoil each and every year. The pundits say that nothing has changed in education in 30 years, that we_re educating kids for a world that no longer exists. Truth? Or Bullshit? One Sunday morning after debating the country’s education woes with my girlfriend we were browsing through a junk store and found a copy of Look Magazine from 1967 with a big cover article on the death of JFK. I flipped it open randomly and found The Future of Education staring at me.

The truth is, if you removed some of the 60’s George Jetson hyperbole ("... four year olds may spend their playtimes discussing the speed, range, and flight dynamics of jet aircraft...") it could have been written yesterday. Thirty years ago the pundits were complaining that nothing had changed in education in thirty years. That means the public education system hasn_t changed in 60 years. What’s the bright light here? Technology will bring changes and a new golden age will dawn.

How much has changed in thirty years? Yet the ideas in this article continue to burn bright and the high minded predictions of a two-way electronic network of ideas has at long last started to prove fruitful. Wasn’t the future wonderful? Here are a few choice nuggets. I hope you have time to read the full article and appreciate your own historical comparisons between 1967 and 2001:

"The very technology that now cries out for a new mode of education creates means for getting it. But new educational devices, though important, are not as central to tomorrow’s schooling as are new roles for student and teacher. Citizens of the future will find much less need for sameness of function or vision. To the contrary, they will be rewarded for diversity and originality. Therefore, any real or imagined need for standardized classroom presentation may rapidly fade; the very first casualty of the present-day school system may well be the whole business of teacher-led instruction as we now know it."

"Central school computers can also help keep track of students as they move freely from one activity to another, whenever moment-by-moment or year-by-year records of students’ progress are needed. This will wipe out even the administrative justification for schedules and regular periods, with all their anti-education effects, and will free teachers to get on with the real business of education."

"The student of the future will truly be an explorer, a researcher, a huntsman who ranges through the new educational world of electronic circuitry and heightened human interaction just as the tribal huntsman ranged the wilds."

"When computers are properly used, in fact, they are almost certain to increase individual diversity. A worldwide network of computers will make all of mankind’s factual knowledge available to students everywhere in a matter of minutes or seconds."

"The world communications net, the all-involving linkage of electronic circuitry, will grow and become more sensitive. It will also develop new modes of feedback so that communication can become dialog instead of monologue. It will breach the wall between ’in’ and ’out’ of school. It will join all people everywhere. When this has happened, we may at last realize that our place of learning is the world itself, the entire planet we live on."

Amen brother.