The School of the Future
The Trouble with Education Today
The $11,000 typically spent on each American student annually is not buying much of an education. One problem is that nearly all students in a classroom are expected to learn the same material in the same amount of time as each other. Nearly all must take the same standardized tests after the same number of school days. A saying well-known to teachers describes the result of disregarding individual differences: a third of the class understands, a third already knows the material, and a third sits there confused.
Those most confused are diagnosed with learning disabilities. In a typical classroom, two to three students receive one of these diagnoses, which fill over 40 pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the bible of psychologists.
Some students struggle for a different reason: they are not fluent in the language of their teachers and textbooks. They struggle to simultaneously learn a language and all of the material that the rest of the students are expected to learn. In a typical American classroom, two students are English language learners. In California, nearly a quarter are.
Today’s schooling does not serve gifted students well either. No federal law requires schools to provide an education that lets them achieve their potential. Without such a law, gifted students are less likely to one day resolve international conflicts, cure cancer, or invent technology that makes life better.
College has its own set of problems, starting with the admissions office. A study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa revealed that a third of students show no growth in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing skills in their four years of college. Nor do many students learn skills needed for their careers. An analysis by Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz reveals that only a quarter of people work in a job related to their college major. Yet, college comes at great expense. Seven in ten graduates leave college with student loan debts. And those debts average $28,400.
Education in 2020
Fortunately, schooling from kindergarten to college is on the brink of a revolution, thanks to technology. Over coming decades, today’s problems will fade away as a new style of schooling takes over.
Classroom software already exists that teaches math and reading skills at a pace appropriate to the student, whether advanced, disabled, or not fluent in English. DreamBox and Lexia are two examples of such software.
Fast learners can move on to material of later grades, thanks to web sites like Khan Academy. A tenth grader might complete twelfth grade math and then take online college courses while still in high school.
More and more often, teachers will begin lessons by saying, “Ok, kids, take out your laptops.” Software will customize instruction to the student. Phrases like, “Math is hard for Johnny” and “Reading comes easily to Jenny” will become obsolete.
Software will help with homework, too, and will help close the achievement gap between privileged and underprivileged children. A parent’s education, availability, or ability to pay a tutor will no longer affect how much a student learns while doing homework.
Over time, educational software will improve, and it will improve faster than public schools because software makers compete with each other―public schools do not. Fueling further software improvement will be data―provided by the software itself―that reveals which computerized teaching methods helped students learn best. Software makers will use this information to create the next version of their products.
Thanks to never-ending software improvement, students who receive an education enhanced by software will eventually outperform other students on standardized tests. When that happens, schools without the software will clamor for it. Considering that some students are already learning from software, that moment could come by 2020.
Even then, though, the computer won’t do it all. When it exhausts its teaching methods and the student still cannot grasp fractions, an experienced teacher will step in. The teacher will also give feedback on a student’s writing, set up an experiment in science, and teach an interpersonal skill to students in a conflict.
Education in 2030
Eventually, with the computer doing much of the teaching, more and more students will simply do their learning at home.
Homeschooling in front of a computer is already here. During winter storms in Indiana, some schools hold online learning days instead of making up the snow days in June. Across the country, over a quarter million other students, from kindergarten to twelfth grade, do their learning online at home.
Sooner or later, describing an online student as a “first grader” or a “high school freshman” will be obsolete. Age, which currently dictates grade level, will be irrelevant. Students will move through a sequence of skills at the pace they can. One student might start learning to read at three years old, another at seven. Learning disorders, which arise from measuring students against others of the same age, could become relics of the past.
Assisting with this online learning will be remote teachers who will teach what software cannot. They will coach students on social and emotional skills, which students will use as they interact remotely with each other. The interactions among students and teachers will look nothing like today’s Skype video calls, though.
Wearing virtual reality goggles, students and teachers will see each other in 3D. Around each student and teacher, multiple video cameras will capture the person. Cameras under the goggles will catch eye expressions. Students and teachers will feel they are in the same room as they look at each other through their virtual reality goggles. To wear them is “to be suffused with the conviction—a cellular conviction, both unimpeachable and too deep for words—that you are in another world,” wrote New York Times journalist Virginia Heffernan after strapping on virtual reality goggles made by the company Oculus. In that other world, the virtual classroom, classmates will gather.
A fellow student can be on the other side of town―or on another continent. Automatic, real-time translation in the person’s own voice already exists. It will let students from different cultures learn with each other, diminishing racism and international conflict.
Students will be able to roam around with each other in virtual spaces―inside a model of a living cell or on an active World War II battlefield. Without leaving their bedrooms, students will be able to walk great distances in these virtual worlds, thanks to omni-directional treadmills. Simple and elaborate ones have already been invented.
Like their feet, students’ hands will also be engaged. Hands-on materials for science, art, and music will arrive at their homes by helicopter drone.
Because virtual learning will involve movement and captivating activities, some symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) will vanish. ADHD is a diagnosis given to children who “become bored with a task after only a few minutes, unless they are doing something enjoyable” and who “fidget and squirm in their seats,” among other symptoms listed by the National Institute of Mental Health. Today, one out of nine children receives the diagnosis. Eventually, ADHD may wind up in the archive of obsolete mental disorders, shelved next to hysteria and the vapors, as virtual schooling takes over.
Although much learning will happen at home, students will sometimes need a laboratory, art studio, sports field, or internship. If they don’t have access to public transportation, they will get there in self-driving cars. Google predicts they will be on sale by 2020. Students will order rides like they do with Uber today.
Hardware like self-driving cars and omni-directional treadmills will pale in comparison to the software behind virtual schooling. By 2029, computers will be able to understand language as well as humans can, according to Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google and an expert in artificial intelligence. He made this prediction by projecting the reliable doubling, every two years, of computing power. A virtual teacher will have enough artificial intelligence to analyze the correctness of answers and engage in back-and-forth discussion. She will coax a young student to read and redirect a distracted student’s attention. She will be friendly, infinitely patient, and visible in 3D to the student wearing virtual reality goggles.
These virtuous, virtual teachers will demand no salary, reducing education’s cost. Further savings may come from using remote human teachers from India and China, who will accept less pay than American teachers, but who will be fluent in English. An online school in Arizona has already experimented with outsourcing the grading of essays to India. Saving even more money will be the absence of school buses and school buildings. Already, the largest operator of virtual schools, K12 Inc., educates students at about half the cost of public school.
For ages, elected officials have promised to cut taxes. Finally, they will be able to deliver. Local governments will gladly pay for virtual schooling to save money. And they will hand out additional cash to parents for choosing a virtual school over a brick and mortar one.
As demand for virtual schooling grows, so too will the number of virtual schools to choose from. Gone will be the days of one option―the one free public school in the neighborhood.
How will a family compare the world’s many virtual schools? Organizations will spring up to review them, just as some newspapers and magazines already rank brick and mortar schools. Reviewing a school will entail observing everything it offers and analyzing the results of standardized testing, which will provide a uniform measure across schools. Students of virtual schools will add their own reviews, just as travelers do on TripAdvisor.com. Once a family has narrowed their options, visiting schools will involve walking no farther than the nearest pair of virtual reality goggles.
Some families will assemble a child’s education from multiple virtual schools―science from one school, math from another, social skills from yet another, but most families will keep the learning under one virtual roof―for convenience and for the rich connections a school can make between the disciplines.
Another choice for families will be how to supervise their children while they learn at home. Some parents will stay home by working remotely, using virtual reality goggles like their children. Other parents will be away at work, watching their children through cameras in the house. And some parents might not be working at all because automation may reduce the need for humans to work.
When a teenager is ready to leave home but is not ready to live completely independently―an age that will vary from student to student―that teen will head to college, but one different from any college today.
Instead of attending lectures, college students will strap on virtual reality goggles and participate in the best courses from around the world. EdX, Coursera, and Khan Academy are a few online institutions already providing virtual courses, some of which are free and wildly popular. A single course can enroll hundreds of thousands of students. Today, virtual courses are mostly lectures on video. But they will become interactive experiences. Students will answer questions electronically during pauses in lectures. Classmates will discuss ideas, seeing each other through their goggles. They will also submit work to be evaluated. But because a single course could one day have millions of students, a teacher will not grade that work; the students will. Coursera uses such a method today, and research suggests that it works. Peer scores correlate well to teacher scores, according to researchers at Pennsylvania State University.
Students will attend their virtual courses right in their dorm rooms. They are already doing so at the Minerva Project, an online university, which has no facilities other than dorm rooms. Colleges of the future, however, will provide more than a room. Students will receive mentoring and internships. These are the top two benefits of college today, according to a Gallup poll of 30,000 students.
Mentors will help students assemble their educations from online courses. They will help with emotional and social matters too. Internships will come from nearby organizations, such as hospitals or engineering firms, which colleges will locate themselves near. Colleges will also provide laboratories, art studios, and other spaces for learning that cannot be done virtually.
Because costs of courses will be distributed among vast numbers of students around the world, college will be cheap. And since colleges won’t provide their own courses, colleges will no longer compete on the quality of their educations. They will compete on price, driving costs even lower. With contributions from governments and philanthropists, college may eventually be free, just as education already is for younger students.
Today’s colleges, which currently deliver little learning at great expense, will go out of business, provide virtual courses, or reinvent themselves to match new colleges.
Upon finishing college, a student will be ready for a career. To an employer, a graduate’s competence is what will matter. The name of the college won’t, since the same courses will be available at every school. The employer will look at a graduate’s list of courses and how well he or she did in them. The quality of the courses will be known because the organizations that already exist to accredit colleges will evolve to accredit individual courses.
Today, people learn skills they will need for a career that is five or ten years away; our education system is one of delayed gratification. But in a world changing faster and faster, one’s skills will need to change just as quickly. Virtual, just-in-time learning will become part of one’s career, blurring the line between work and school, and granting immediate gratification.
Education in 2040
Eventually, computers will acquire human-level intelligence. They are on their way. A computer can make basic sense of language, as IBM’s Watson computer did to win Jeopardy. A computer can learn to recognize faces. A computer can drive a car.
When computers can do everything we can do, they will do everything we don’t feel like doing. For one thing, we won’t need to work. Without work, we will stop earning money. Without money, we will stop buying things. Computers, and the robots they are in, will provide us with everything we once bought.
But we will continue to learn. Satisfying our curiosity, engaging in hobbies, and voting will continue to be reasons to educate ourselves.
Education in 2050
One day, perhaps by 2050, we will be able to connect our brains to computers that help us think better. Connecting neurons to electronics is already possible. Cochlear implants let the deaf hear. Other brain implants treat Parkinson's disease. Once implants can think, some of our learning will happen through wireless downloads.
Education in 2060
One day, if you choose, your intelligence, personality, and memories will be duplicated in a computer while you sleep. You will wake up with your mind running in that electronic brain. You will, at last, learn effortlessly and at the speed of light.
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