Then and Now in Education

The School of Tomorrow will pay far more attention to individuals than the schools of the past. Each child will be studied and measured repeatedly from many angles, both as a basis of prescriptions for treatment and as a means of controlling development. The new education will be scientific in that it will rest on a fact basis. All development of knowledge and skill will be individualized, and classroom practice and recitation as they exist today in conventional schools will largely disappear. […] Experiments in laboratories and in schools of education [will discover] what everyone should know and the best way to learn essential elements.

This is not, you may be forgiven for thinking, from a Knewton blog post. It was written in 1924 and comes from Otis W. Caldwell & Stuart A. Courtis Then and Now in Education, 1845: 1923 (New York: Appleton) and is cited in Petrina, S. 2002. ‘Getting a Purchase on “The School of Tomorrow” and its Constituent Commodities: Histories and Historiographies of Technologies’ History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 75-111.

In the same year that Caldwell and Courtis predicted the School of Tomorrow, Sidney Pressey, ‘contrived an intelligence testing machine, which he transformed during 1924-1934 into an ‘Automatic Teacher.’ His machine automated and individualized routine classroom processes such as testing and drilling. It could reduce the burden of testing and scoring for teachers and therapeutically treat students after examination and diagnosis’ (Petrina, p. 99). Six years later, the ‘Automatic Teacher’ was recognised as a commercial failure. For more on Pressey’s machine (including a video of Pressey demonstrating it), see Audrey Watter’s excellent piece.

Caldwell, Courtis and Pressey are worth bearing in mind when you read the predictions of people like Knewton’s Jose Ferreira. Here are a few of his ‘Then and Now’ predictions:

“Online learning” will soon be known simply as “learning.” All of the world’s education content is being digitized right now, and that process will be largely complete within five years. (01.09.2010)

There will soon be lots of wonderful adaptive learning apps: adaptive quizzing apps, flashcard apps, textbook apps, simulation apps — if you can imagine it, someone will make it. In a few years, every education app will be adaptive. Everyone will be an adaptive learning app maker. (23.04.13)

Right now about 22 percent of the people in the world graduate high school or the equivalent. That’s pathetic. In one generation we could get close to 100 percent, almost for free. (19.07.13)

95% of materials (textbooks, software, etc used for classes, tutoring, corp training…) will be purely online in 5-10 years. That’s a $200B global industry. And people predict that 50% of higher ed and 25% of K-12 will eventually be purely online classes. If so, that would create a new, $3 trillion or so industry. (25.11.2013)

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