Cheaper Teaching, Faster Learning

Today most students, most of the time, are educated not that differently from the way they were when records began over 3,000 years ago. Classes of students taught by an instructor have existed at least as far back as Mentuhotep II, the 11th dynasty pharoah who unified Egypt from the chaos of the First Intermediate Period, ushering in the Middle Kingdom in approximately 2040 BCE. The tomb of Kheti, his treasurer, calls upon graduates to show good behavior.

No word on whether Kheti was requesting people to act better than they used to behave in class, or simply to remember to use what they were taught there. However it's a good bet there were classes. Groups of students congregated and instructors taught them, just like today.

But now, as we march into the future, things are changing. Distance education is increasing because basic social forces are pushing it along. The core characteristic of the traditional class, classroom, and teacher paradigm relevant to distance education is its relatively higher cost and hence lower efficiency. Thus more distance education means saving money. Change is the path of least resistance because solutions are both available and incentivized by the lure of faster and cheaper. The "invisible hand" proposed by Adam Smith, father of the economics field, is busily at work as you read this. That's hard to fight off forever.

Looking at the core issue more closely, it is really a collection, or better a web, of related more specific subissues. One is duplication of effort. There is an immense amount of it, and it is very expensive. If you have a million students, and a student-teacher ratio of 20-to-1, that's 50,000 teachers. Teaching is an honorable and socially valuable profession, but it's not very high paying as professions go (honor is cheaper to bestow than pay). Still, the cost to employ 50,000 of them adds up. Suppose the cost per teacher was around $100,000 a year (including salary, health care, retirement contributions and other benefits as well as suppport personnel from janitors to secretaries to highly paid administrators of endless variety). That is...let's see...$5 billion per year. Now suppose each student learned at their own computer, with one teacher overseeing each subject for all 1 million students. Each lecture was downloaded 1 million times, by each student. Each homework and quiz was scored by the computer. Every wrong answer was linked to a short (or maybe long) lecture also provided by that one teacher. And each student proceeded at his or her own pace. The one actual live teacher would spend much of the time analyzing currents of misunderstanding and other holdups, and recording mini-lectures and course updates to fix those misunderstandings and otherwise improve the course.

Some teachers are safer from displacement by distance education than others. Safest are teachers who teach subjects that are not realistically teachable at a distance. Kindergarten teachers and primary school teachers are safe. In higher education, subjects like art, music, theater, and communication are in a much better position than subjects that are more easily taught using distance education technologies, like technical subjects of many kinds. Thus the need for teachers in the future seems most secure for many teachers in lower-paying fields, while least secure for the currently higher paying technically oriented fields because of the economies of scale promised by advances in distance education. Let's discuss these latter subjects further.

If thousands of teachers teaching the same things sounds like a lot of duplication, consider this. The number of students learning the same things is many times greater! If imagining a world where any one topic is learned and later used by just one student stretches the non-duplication idea past the breaking point, it is undeniable that students generally learn some things they don’t really need to know. And if time is money, this can get expensive: if a person starts kindergarten at 5 years old, graduates from college and starts work at 22, and retires at 65, that is 60 years of which over one quarter is spent in school. While child labor is thankfully a thing of the past in civilized countries (where “civilized” means, in part, no child labor), it is not a requirement to wait until 22 to work, and even for someone who does, replacing study of less important topics with study of more important ones would result in a more effective 22-year-old.

More mundanely, higher education is bedeviled by lack of focus. Four year degrees often take more than four years, particularly for engineering majors who still, all too often, graduate never having learned to communicate effectively, while having had various courses of little or no use in their future careers. Two-year degrees have a similar problem: two years is often longer than is really needed to enable the career advancement that motivates the pursuit of such a degree. Certificate programs are shorter, more focused, and hence more efficient. Sometimes a 4-year degree plus a certificate is a great combination for employability – mostly because of the certificate. As with the duplication issue, this lack of focus is wasteful and inefficient, which is to say unnecessarily expensive in terms of money, the economic common denominator. Hence change is incentivized by Adam Smith’s ever-present invisible hand.

Changes to expect are more certificates based on just a few college courses rather than an entire multi-year degree curriculum; students taking a single course to meet a specific educational goal, where the course title, syllabus, and grade constitute a certificate of mastery of a specific topic; and students achieving a collection of certificates and useful individual courses instead of a single multi-year degree. Additional changes that may occur are attempts by colleges and universities to sell education by incentivizing individual professors to promote enrollment in their courses, because more enrollment in a course means more income from it. This would work better in an educational environment rich in certificate-seeking students, because such an environment will have few required courses compared to the many that are required for typical multi-year degrees. Requiring a course to be taken tends to inflate its enrollment over what it would be if students were freer to enroll or not based on their perception of the educational value of the course. At any rate, if you have been to college you can doubtless appreciate the magnitude of change in the college experience that would ensue if students pursued collections of certificates instead of single multi-year degrees.

If the future of focused, career-oriented education is one of distance ed, computerized efficiency, and certificates of ccometency in specific areas, what about the future of traditional education? Namely intellectually broadening, reflective, critical thinking skills-enhancing educations. That tradition arose from many centuries of advanced education available mainly to, and intended to enable, an elite few - leaders of busniess, military, and government. The increasing focus on higher education for as many people as possible, incentivized by modern economies, correspondingly disincentivizes providing the more traditional, broadening type of education to the general public. Here are the disincentives.

1) The elite are incentivized to maximize their wealth, an agenda which requires the support of the general public. General support for such an agenda can of course only be obtained by cloaking it. Take taxation. Taxes tend to recirculate money acquired  by the wealthiest from the rest of society back down again. To cloak this (and other governmental regulations intended to benefit the general public), the label "job-killing" is a favorite, even though tax funds and other government regulations can be used to create jobs that might not otherwise be created. Various such labelings are promoted by a well-oiled and -funded PR machine that depends on the general public not seeing behind the cloak. That in turn disincentivizes education that enhances wisdom and awareness, thus incentivizing lobbying groups to promote policies tending to shrivel such education.

2) Awareness and wisdom-enhancing education competes for students' attention with study of more focused, specific skills.

3) Powerful institutions, like religious organizations and governments, have an interest in indoctrination. That can conflict with enhancement of critical thinking skills. This incentivizes attempts to weaken it.

There is yet another way that Smith’s invisible hand incentivizes future change to education. Groups of students meeting in classrooms requires people to spend time and money traveling daily or even moving to another city, and deal with scheduling difficulties. Institutions must build and maintain classroom space, parking lots, and so on. Teaching on-line can save a lot of student, teacher, and institutional resources. So, how could on-line education not continue to grow as the technology available continues to improve? Eventually, it seems likely to become the rule rather than the exception. The potential savings are vast, and incentivize it to happen.

Longer term. Some things that need to be learned now won’t need to be in the future. The past provides examples. Calculators are so ubiquitous that learning to hand calculate is less crucial than it once was. Ever more advanced automatic mathematical problem solving capabilities may not make math courses obsolete, but will certainly change what is taught. Algebra and calculus instruction will focus more on problem definition and less on problem solution – since computers will solve problems once they are defined. Spell checkers make spelling less important to spend study time on that could be spent studying something else instead. This trend will only continue. What is next? Perhaps grammar will be unnecessary to learn, as automatic grammar checkers already work pretty well. Learning foreign languages is getting less important now that Web search engines are providing translations online, in real time as needed. Real time audio translation will make it possible to travel anywhere and talk to anyone, regardless of language, with just a cell phone app. Then there will be even less need to learn a foreign language. Uncounted millions of students worldwide will no longer need to spend uncounted hours learning English, and vice versa.

As brain-computer interfaces improve, academic subjects will be available as small devices that clip onto the ear and talk to you. Call it eartop computing. Such a device will contain an entire history textbook (or a dozen, or a thousand varied textbooks) and will be able to talk to you about the material. Facts will become less important to memorize. Such devices will hear and understand what you say at first, and later, they will understand what they themselves say to you. Eventually they may read your brainwaves directly, by-passing your vocal chords. When implantable chips come along, they will seem like a natural, incremental upgrade, and anyone who sees it differently will soon be persuaded otherwise by their own eartop upon which they depend for everything from translation to finding their way around town. More than just books stored on a tiny eartop or implanted computer, these devices will potentially become guardian angels,  acting as personal knowledge sources and advice givers. People will depend on them for thinking the way they now depend on vehicles for moving.

At this point, teachers will be unnecessary. Of mainly historical interest, people (and their implanted or eartop guardian angels) will wonder at the old days when education was needed. Teaching will have been replaced by computing. Later, learning will have been replaced by computing as well. A human without embedded computing modules will be as handicapped relative to other humans as a human today who is deaf, blind, and mute. Education will be a thing of the past, and life will be hard to imagine.

What Should We Do?


Nothing. Things will sort themselves out in due course.


References


"Classes of students taught by an instructor have existed at least as far back as...the First Intermediate Period": E. Strouhal, Life of the Ancient Egyptians, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992, ISBN 080612475X, p. 36.