January 15, 1998                                                    1998.1
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Before getting to his essay, here's an excerpt from a Jan. 12 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, written by Colleen Cordes. It concerns the December conference on technology and education held at Columbia University. Miller was one of the speakers at that conference, and Cordes writes of his contribution:

While he was editor of the Harvard Education Letter, Edward Miller concluded that academe had a new sacred cow -- the role of computers in education.

At an unusually critical conference here last month on that very topic, Mr. Miller recalled how "things really hit the fan" when he aired his reservations about the rush toward new technology for teaching.

That was in 1996, just after President Clinton had called for every classroom to be hooked up to the Internet. Mr. Miller told The New York Times that such a goal was low on his own list of education priorities, and that the research evidence on the usefulness of technology in improving schools was "not very encouraging."

To him, what he said seemed "rather mild and judicious." But it generated what he described as an "almost hysterical reaction" among some administrators and faculty members at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which publishes the newsletter.

The school had been wooing some corporate executives in hopes of getting major gifts, Mr. Miller said, and apparently the potential donors were angered by his words. A senior professor blasted him in an email message sent to the deans and other senior faculty members. To his knowledge, he said, no one came to his defense.

"I was accused by various people of trying to stab the school in the back," said Mr. Miller, who added that his departure from the publication later that year was nevertheless amicable.

His experience at a leading university and his own education research, he said, have convinced him that basic questions about the impact of computers on students have rarely been asked, let alone systematically studied.

SLT

Proponents of the education-equals-income theory point to the large and growing gap in income between the highly educated and those with a high school diploma or less. Whether education really makes people more productive is beside the point. All that matters is that people believe, as they increasingly do, that schooling makes them more employable. Those who go to the "better" schools get the higher paying jobs regardless of their actual ability to do anything useful.

Those students relying on the public schools to get them to this exalted academic level are on crumbling ground. Historically, public schools in America were justified as necessary for democracy: without education, Jefferson and the other founders of the nation argued, people could not be trusted to act as responsible citizens. But with economic advantage now replacing democratic ideals as the reason for education, public schooling makes little sense.

In a market economy there must be competition, meaning winners and losers. There is no incentive to provide every child with a good education. Parents naturally want their own children to be the winners. Why should they pay for other children's education? As the willingness of the public to put money into public schools evaporates, the inevitable result is that education will, in not too many years, become a subsidiary of the business world, controlled and managed by multinational corporations.

The beginnings of this change are already evident in the growth of for-profit charter schools, companies specializing in preparing students for standardized tests, and corporate sponsorship of various aspects of public school operations from curricular materials to athletic teams to the lunchroom.

American businesspeople have long thought that they would be much better at running the education system than the fuzzy-headed academics and social welfare types who are still, for the most part, in charge. In the 21st century, they're finally going to get their chance.

The captains of global industry will soon decide that the old curriculum, founded on the traditional "three Rs," has little relation to the emerging needs of 21st-century business. Reading and 'riting take too much time, and 'rithmetic is much better done by machines. As for history, literature, and the classical disciplines of art and music, these subjects have little value as mass entertainment and therefore no business in education. Thus, the three Rs will in time be replaced by the "three Ms": Multi-Tasking, Materialistics, and Mind Management.

What the emerging technology-driven corporation needs, first of all, is workers who are able to do many things at once. Productivity suffers when employees are undone by information overload or the demands of multimedia, hypertext, the interactive office, and the totally connected economy. Thus, Multi-Tasking will become an essential skill that must be learned from early childhood.

Most young children, after all, display an unfortunate tendency to concentrate all their attention on just one object or task at a time. The development of television demonstrated that children could be trained to take in -- and even to prefer -- visual and auditory stimuli delivered at a much more rapid pace than was previously thought possible. In the primary schools of the 21st century children will watch ten screens simultaneously while carrying on three synchronous telephone conversations; passing grades will be awarded to those who do this without being distracted by the other children doing those same things in the tiny cubicles all around them.

The explosive development -- and commercial use -- of virtual reality and computer- mediated experience will necessitate a whole new kind of learning, which will be lumped under the name Materialistics. Simply put, people will have to be taught to distinguish between objects and actions in the material world, which operate under the old limitations of physics and biology, and those in the virtual world, which resemble real-world objects and actions but are limited only by the imagination of their human creators. Since most aspects of daily life will be lived virtually, schools will take students on carefully controlled field trips into the "material environment," that is, the real world.

The growth of Multi-Tasking in the workplace of the future will present another kind of problem. The unmanageable volume of data will produce a phenomenon known as "mindblow," in which the worker's personality gradually disintegrates as he begins to spend all his time in the virtual world, creating avatars (alternate versions of himself), immersed in elaborate role-playing games, and finally descending into incoherence and catatonia.

The solution (to be invented in the year 2037 by the consulting firm Andersen, Ernst, Coopers, & Waterhouse) will be called Mind Management, in which children learn to monitor incoming sensory impressions and to filter out all those that are not immediately useful, in a task-oriented, value-added sense. Mind Management will also offer 21st-century educators another benefit: it will prove to be enormously effective in training children not to ask annoying or troubling questions about school.