EDUCATION HAS NOT KEPT PACE WITH COMMUNICATION

Charles Lawton – Op-Ed in the Portland (Maine) Press Herald | http://bit.ly/gCnAiG

March 6, 2011 - To illustrate the principle of the lever, Archimedes was alleged to have said, "Give me where I may stand, and I will move the world."

His point, I think, illustrates the fact that we are often so close to our problems that we cannot see them clearly enough to understand what they really are. And, failing to understand the problem, we naturally fail to solve it. Nowhere is this more evident than in our perpetual efforts to "reform" education.

Since at least the time of the ancient Greeks when Socrates attracted the young of Athens to discuss the meaning of wisdom, we have defined education as the interplay of three elements -- an expert (the teacher), a place (the school) and those who come to the place (the students) to "get" what the expert is giving. Education reform has always been about how we rearrange one or all of these three elements.

How do we certify the "expert"? How much do we pay her/him? How big and where do we build the schools? What experts do we put in them? What collateral material (libraries, laboratories, dining halls, gyms) do we put in them? How do we admit/attract the students? How many? At what times? For how long? At what price? Paid for by whom?

From the "up close" perspective, these problems seem insoluble. No amount of tinkering with student-teacher ratios, faculty salaries, expenditures per capita or per square foot can balance our budgets while ensuring a consistent flow of graduates who consistently demonstrate that they have "gotten" what the experts had to give.

Stepping back from the problem, the most obvious conclusion is that our methods of educating have not kept pace with our methods of communicating.

The fixed-place, set-schedule, one-to-many system of education is a last-century anachronism in our many-to-many, anytime, anyplace, wisdom-of-crowds system of communication.

In the product-dominated era of industrialization, education served the economy by helping us make "things" from the abundance of the natural environment around us.

In the service-dominated era of the 21st century, education will serve the economy by helping us make "meaning" from the abundance of information around us.

In the past, we struggled to make food. Today we struggle to solve an epidemic of obesity. It's not that our economy won't still make "things." It's that the value of the things will lie increasingly in their meaning, in how we use them.

OK, interesting perspective, nice theory, but how does it help us balance the budget?

First answer: Drop the obsession with fixed places and fixed times. Second answer: Drop the obeisance to the council of experts who control the "what" of education, who decide what it is that students have to "get."

The single most important thing we can do to create jobs in Maine today is to convince the companies who have them that they don't have to leave the state to fill them. And the single most important thing we can do to make that happen is to lock the CEOs and human resources directors of L.L. Bean, Wright Express, Idexx, Unum, Health Dialogue, Hannaford Bros. and other successful Maine companies in a room with the deans of our state university's engineering, mathematics, computer science, information technology, risk management, creative writing and philosophy departments and demand that they design, staff and deliver educational programs utilizing 21st-century communication technologies to enable these companies to reach their full growth potential here in Maine.

We have a long history in Maine of watching politicians rush with crisis management teams to the most recently closed shoe shop, paper mill or sardine cannery to promise that "the state will do everything it can" to save these jobs.

Today, the jobs we need to save are not the old ones we used to have but the new ones we could have. And the only way we can achieve this goal is to abandon the antiquated structures and attitudes of our education system.

We can't afford to have an engineering school that "belongs" to Orono. It must be Maine's -- designed for and delivered to all of Maine.

We can't afford to have a health education system scattered across public schools and private schools, across 39 hospitals and biomedical research institutions. The "industry" that has consistently produced more job growth over the past generation than any other deserves better. And a more creative use of 21st-century communications technologies can deliver better.

We can't afford to allow tens of thousands of high school seniors leave school intimately familiar with the career paths of the finalists of "American Idol" and "Survivor East Meddybemps" but clueless about the range and variety of paths that stretch before them.

The question on the mind of every elected official staring dejectedly at a table of education budget numbers should be not, "How do I cut this?" but "How do I use the communications technology that's exploding around me to reallocate what's left?"

• Charles Lawton is senior economist for Planning Decisions, a public policy research firm. He can be reached at: clawton@maine.rr.com
• smf’s daughter is going to college in Maine.