Future Here Now: the Crumbling Barriers to Entry
In this issue:
Can you start a school?
No biggie.
Too much free speech might prevent you from hearing important stuff
Should school be shorter?
My kid knew every known thing about jumping spiders by the time he was 12. He could have taught an undergraduate course on the genus fittipus.
He’s not a genius. He had YouTube.
One of the huge sea changes that we have not gotten our heads around, at all, is the ease with which almost anyone can become an expert in almost anything. In the not too distant past, access to information, to knowledge, depended on access to teachers, librarians,places to learn, classrooms, books. Becoming an expert in anything required privilege — the right connections, skills, permissions, credentials. Without those, all the doors slammed shut.
What happens to credentials and expertise when virtually all the knowledge you could ever want is available in a relatively cheap consumer product in your pocket?
My hunch is that kids my son’s age and younger are already asking that question, which is why we’re seeing privileged kids for whom college would have been a given pre-COVID questioning the value of debt-fuelled further education. If I can learn it online, why would I pay money to sit in another classroom and get a piece of paper?
Of course, we still treat the paper, not the learning itself, as the qualification. And there are surely things that you can’t learn through a video screen. So most still feel compelled to get some manner of formal education, complete with paper. But if the learning can come without the cost and the paper, how long can those now-artificial barriers to access stand? How soon does near-frictionless access to information transform what it means to know, to be qualified?
Years ago, the then-director of the University of Michigan MBA program said on a podcast that experiential learning would become the future of education. I think that’s true — I learned about the power of direct experience years ago as an education undergrad, and built my approach to public engagement around the power of grappling directly with new information.
But that’s a profoundly different type of teaching — and learning — than what we’ve all experienced. It means that the teacher isn’t just unlocking access to received wisdom. It means that the teacher guides the student through the messy and overwhelming world of near-infinite, immediate information.
And that means that the classroom, the credential, the diploma and the information itself, change as profoundly as it did from Plato’s Socratic method to the printing press. And we’ve just barely begun.
If we now have near-frictionless access to almost all information, how does that force us to change our public meetings? Our real estate negotiations? Our hiring practices? Our management systems?
