Future Here Now: the Crumbling Barriers to Entry
Signals
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?
Production Note: the links to the original articles are in the headlines of each article.
Can you start a school? Sure thing.
How few people thought of opening their own school in 1925? The difference between then and now is that you don’t have to walk into the experience relying solely on your own expertise. If you can learn what you need, without dealing with any gatekeepers, as fast as you can learn it, then you don’t have to have a teaching license or the blessing of a school board to put your ideas into action.
Is that good? Is that not good? Do we know?
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What are you waiting for? ‘Cause the future isn’t.
Bye-bye, code gatekeepers
Information gatekeeping isn’t just the purview of old realms of knowledge. For the past couple of decades, the ability to write computer code has represented a path to career, good incomes, and respect, even sometimes for people who didn’t have wealth or traditional access.
Now you don’t even have to understand code in order to create something out of coding.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t need people who can write and understand code anymore (if you can’t, you are definitely at risk of being taken advantage of …#lessonlearned). But it does represent a pretty severe earthquake undermining the special status that being able to code conferred, not at all long ago. The gates are falling off their hinges faster than ever.
Should school be shorter?
I don’t usually give two articles from the same source, but this one….man, you need to read it.
If our children spent less time in the classroom, and more time accessing the universe of information outside it, what else could they do?
From my experience: a hell of a lot more than we can even imagine.