The School Revolution (9 page)

Parents are afraid that their children will not survive in the competitive environment of college. This is a legitimate
fear. But the way to deal with this fear is not to put the children in a high school classroom setting where the number of students is small and where the teacher can give individual attention to each student.
That is the worst way to prepare a student for the
rigors of college competition
. The best way to prepare a student for that kind of competition is to put the student, no later than the
sixth grade, into a self-taught curriculum program that separates him from a classroom teacher. This way, the student learns the techniques of self-instruction so that when he walks onto a college campus, he is not dependent on any professor or teaching assistant to get through the course. He is not dependent upon any third party to take him by the hand.

This is difficult
for parents to accept. They do not think ahead far enough. They have forgotten what they experienced in college, or perhaps they did not go to college. They think that the training method of the classroom, preferably a small classroom, is the best preparation for the college environment. This places their children at a competitive disadvantage when they go off to college. The students have not learned
the basics of self-instruction, self-motivation, and self-evaluation. They are still dependent on the lecture method. They are still dependent on their own note taking.

All this may seem new to you. If it does, that is because you are still locked into a mode of education that became technologically obsolete sometime around 1450. Traditions die hard. But eventually they die. And the
tradition of classroom education is going to die soon enough, because the digital revolution is transforming collegiate education. This transformation is going to work its way down into high school programs. It is beginning, but it is not yet widespread. The teachers do not know how to use the new technologies. They are part of a bureaucratic system of education, and that system does not reward innovation.

Libertarians and conservatives should get a head start on this technological transformation of education. The sooner we help our children make the transition to self-instruction, the better it will be for them.

We need to produce more leaders. Leaders do not find it difficult to make decisions on their own. They do not need to return
to a teacher on a regular basis to master new material. A leader is someone who is capable of self-instruction at an advanced level, able to make decisions rapidly and confidently, and willing to bear responsibility for the outcome of any decision. We need leaders, and we do not get leaders by subjecting them to classroom instruction.

T
he future of education is online education. It offers many advantages over classroom education, but the greatest advantage is cost. Online education can be delivered free of charge to millions of people. This has already begun. It has begun at the collegiate level, and it has begun in kindergarten through twelfth
grade.

Let us consider collegiate education. Six of the best colleges and universities in the United States have combined to post their courses online for free: Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, Georgetown, Wellesley, and the University of Texas (https://www.edx.org). When schools in the top tier adopt a program of free online education, we can be sure that this is the future.

To compete against this group, another group of universities, almost as prestigious, has combined to offer a comparable program called Coursera (www.Coursera.org). At present, about six dozen universities are involved, but this number is growing rapidly.

When you have the finest universities in the United States, plus several prestigious universities outside the United States, joining
together to provide comprehensive classes in virtually every area of academics, you know what is going to happen to classroom education. Poor, bright students around the world will be able get their education online, free of charge. They may not decide to get their degrees from these institutions, but they can get course work from faculty members of the most prestigious universities in the world.
The next step will be for these universities to grant certificates of course completion. These will not be the equivalent of a degree, but in the developing world, they will be worth a lot of money. They will be door-openers. People will still go to the best universities in order to access the old-boy networks that provide lifetime contacts and an entrée to good jobs. But, if we are talking
about education, if these schools begin to grant certificates of course completion, conventional universities will be in big trouble.

In effect, these top-tier universities have “baptized” online education. Any critic of online education in general now has no plausible case. Here is the answer: “Are you saying that Harvard and MIT are not providing first-rate education online? Are you
saying that digital technology is inherently inferior for education than the classroom model?”
When these schools decided to go online, they provided legitimacy for online education
. They broke the barrier. From now on, online education is in the arena of higher education. From this point on, online education will become a serious competitor at the collegiate level.

What about online education from kindergarten through twelfth grade? The premier program here is the Khan Academy. It has thousands of free videos for use by students around the world. The developer of the site, Salman Khan, earned a bachelor’s degree at MIT. He earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Sometime around 2005, he began tutoring his young
cousins and other family members in mathematics. Then, to speed up the process, he began posting videos of his tutorials on YouTube. One of his tutees told him that his videos were better than he was in person. At that point, Khan decided to create a website where he could post these videos. He began with basic arithmetic: one plus one equals two. After eight hundred videos, a student will have gone
through calculus. Khan added other courses. In early 2013, one could find this summary of the Khan Academy on Wikipedia:

Bill Gates and other rich men began donating to the academy. It is now the premier teaching site on the Web.

There is no question by now that classroom
education in the liberal arts is going to become second-rate education as digital technologies improve
. Over time, the best education anybody can receive in most college majors will be online education. The
competition is already becoming fierce. The best schools are posting videos of their best professors so that anyone can take their courses. The quality of these courses will be evident to anybody comparing them with standard classroom lectures in standard colleges delivered by standard professors.
The best and the brightest professors will be online free of charge
. A college that refuses to post
its faculty members’ courses will be suspected of being embarrassed by the quality of its courses. This will put pressure on all colleges to post their courses online for free. Students and parents will be able to “test-drive” courses. A lot of colleges will fail the test.

We are already seeing high school districts adopting online
education. This is not done primarily for educational purposes. It is done for financial purposes. It is much cheaper for a school district to post a series of videos online than to bring students into the classroom. Online education is becoming popular in rural school districts where students must take buses for ninety minutes or more each way. A simple Google search of “online learning in rural
school districts” will reveal numerous articles and resources on the subject. By consolidating school districts in the 1970s and ’80s, these new geographically huge districts became economically liable for transporting students free of charge from their communities to central high schools: long drives, few students. Districts are able to cut these expenses by adopting online videos as the means of
teaching students in their own communities, or even in their own homes.
The moment a school district does this, it is admitting that online instruction is as good as classroom instruction
. Any attempt by classroom teachers to say that this is third-rate instruction will meet resistance by the school district’s administrators. If word gets out that the school is delivering a third-rate education,
it will call into question the judgment of the school district. The administrators do not dare admit that any form of education they offer is third-rate education. Therefore, by posting videos online, and by moving students to distance learning, school districts legitimize these new technologies as being equal to classroom instruction.

The cost reduction offered by online education
is so great that school districts around the United States will be tempted to add more and more courses to their online programs.
This is a
major threat to the teachers’ union
. An effective lecturer can be hired to teach a particular course to every student on a high school campus. The other teachers on the payroll who would normally teach the same course will be relegated to support status. School
districts will be able to hire low-cost replacements of existing faculties, because these replacement teachers will do only low-level instruction: grade papers, make comments in the margins, and remain in the background. This means that all but the teachers most effective in front of a video camera will see their careers stymied. They will not get promoted. They will not get pay raises. They
are easily replaceable. Legally, at present, a new teacher who is just out of college has the same certification as someone who has been in the classroom for twenty years but who is no longer needed.

Students can be taught by e-mail. If they have questions, they can e-mail one of the support-level teachers. The main teacher, who has all the exposure, and the highest salary,
need not be bothered by students. This will be the prestige position on every high school campus. This is what the best and the brightest teachers will aspire to. There will be a new hierarchy of teachers. There will be the visible ones, who are effective in front of a video camera, and there will be all the rest, who are relegated to support status. This is an efficient way of dealing with education.
It will enable school districts to cut costs.

There is an old rule in technology. When a new technology cuts the cost of operation by 90 percent, it always replaces an existing technology. The promoters of the old technology may complain, but it will do them no good. They can tell buyers that their old technology is worth the extra money, but the vast majority of buyers will not listen
to them. When a new technology is ten times cheaper than an old technology, it is going to replace that old technology. The cost of delivering online education is no more than 10 percent of classroom education: no campus, no maintenance, no heating or cooling, no school buses, not much administration, no discipline problems, and software-graded exams.

Software-graded exams save money.
This is how SAT and ACT exams are graded. So are CLEP exams. CLEP exams are produced by the College Board, which produces the SAT. CLEP stands for College Level Examination Program. Pass a CLEP with a score of 50 or higher, and you get full college credit. These exams are the basis for getting into a good college. The academic world honors these machine-graded exams. It is therefore possible, through
online education, for one teacher to teach an unlimited number of students, with only a low-cost graduate university student grading essay exams and answering students’ questions by e-mail. This is low-level work. It can be paid by the hour—no retirement plan, no healthcare insurance, no tenure. The main lecturer will get paid an above-average salary but will be able to teach every student on
a high school campus the same course.

Let’s go beyond this. Across the nation, successful teachers with advanced degrees will post their courses. A teacher can give away his lessons, just as Khan does. Or maybe he sells access at, say, $50 per year per student. He signs up, say, 5,000 students, or 10,000 students. School districts pay this tuition. Then they hire graduate students to
grade the written exams, if any. You can see where this is headed. The students get the best teachers in the country. The local school district cuts the cost from, say, $11,000 per student to, say, $500. Maybe $1,000.

What is true of a high school teacher is also true of a college instructor. The University of Phoenix now has almost four hundred thousand enrolled students. It is the
most profitable educational institution in the United States. It is fully accredited, and it is priced competitively. There are some schools that are far less expensive, but they are not well known. The University of Phoenix is significantly less expensive than most private colleges in the United States. That is because it has no campus. It has some rented space in commercial buildings. Go to this
Web page: http://www.phoenix.edu/campus-locations.html.

If you click on it, up pops a Google map of locations near your zip code. There is no way that underfunded, campus-based schools will be able to compete with the extension of online education by universities that imitate the University of Phoenix. When you think that something in the range of twenty million students are enrolled
in the United States, and one university has four hundred thousand of them, you get the picture. Most of the smaller schools are going to go out of business.

Online videos overcome many of the problems of classroom lectures. The main one is this:
you can back up a video and watch it again
. You cannot do this with a classroom lecture. The other advantages involve such things as visuals,
links to other sites, and the use of that most remarkable of all encyclopedias, Wikipedia. You do not need a textbook if you provide links to articles on Wikipedia. Any teacher can compile a textbook from Wiki articles. They are in the public domain. He can add comments.

What is true at the college and public high school level is equally
true of homeschool education. It is now possible to create an online homeschool curriculum that is offered free of charge. I have decided not to do this with my own curriculum, because I think that parents are willing to pay extra money to make certain their children have access to a unique curriculum with a certain viewpoint. I would use the tuition money for advertising capital. (“There ain’t
no such thing as a free advertising campaign.”) The course designers are paid. Students will have access to forums in which they can interact with one another. By charging parents a fee, I eliminate students whose parents are really not very interested in the content of my education. I want students to deal with other students whose families are highly supportive of the worldview that governs
my curriculum. There is an old phrase: “You get what you pay for.” I think this is a good operating principle. But my goal has been to keep the cost low enough that any middle-class family can afford this program.

There will be a multiplication of online programs. This is a good thing. We need more competition in education. The greater the variety of educational programs, the better
it is for families. Families will be able to select curricula that come close to the fundamental principles they are committed to. They will be able to supply their children with fully developed courses structured in terms of the first principles on which each of the families builds its future. For those families committed to the principle of limited government—federal, state, and local—my curriculum
is the best thing available for them. Other families are not equally committed to this principle. They will have to seek out curricula structured in terms of whatever first principles they are committed to. That is what liberty is all about: choices.

There is no way that tax-funded education will be able to compete with the proliferation of free
or low-cost curriculum programs. The main service that tax-funded schools will be able to provide is babysitting for eight months of the year. A few districts may be committed to rigorous academic programs, and will be able to generate revenue from outside their districts by charging tuition for online education to families outside the district. I expect that this will happen. A handful of public
schools will become dominant in teaching students from around the nation. This competition is healthy.