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Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Why Cell Phones Will Kill The Public Schools Before 2040

The Ron Paul Curriculum is 100% digital. It does not use classrooms. It does not require parents to buy any textbooks. It is the wave of the future -- the not too far-distant future.

This is because of Moore's law: computer chip density doubles every 18 months. That was in 1965, when Gordon Moore of Intel made this observation. Today, it's close to every 12 months.

I take seriously Ray Kurzweil's estimates on information costs. His article on the law of accelerating returns(2001) is a classic. It has influenced my thinking.

Moore's law is accelerating. Kurzweil wrote this in 2001:

In line with my earlier predictions, supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by around 2020. By 2030, it will take a village of human brains (around a thousand) to match $1000 of computing. By 2050, $1000 of computing will equal the processing power of all human brains on Earth.

What will a public school teach a student who owns a computer as powerful as Hillary Clinton's village? What if this computer is a cell phone?

What will a public school teach 2,000 students in 2030? What will be the range of student performance? When the top 20% are equipped with this tool, what will the curriculum look like? What teacher will be bright enough to teach such students? A smartphone app will be a better teacher by far than whoever is in the classroom.

What will that teacher do for a living? Not teach. Monitor. Enforce discipline. Schools will be warehousing operations. Everyone will know this. They will be for the disciplinary problems.

How will these people train the best and the brightest for the brave new world of digital production?

The exodus will begin.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent idea, you know how much money we could save by shutting down schools

Anonymous said...

This is probably correct, and we are fast approaching that. Getting the kids motivated to use them to learn is the problem. Handing out free money kills the incentive.