| Sell Academia Short |
On the subject of investment recommendations, there is one other recommendation (not covered in the initial issues of Gilder-Robinson) that everyone should consider.
Do not invest in any aspect of the current American educational system - elementary or university. If I knew a way to sell this system short, at least one-fourth of our long-term investment capital would be doing so.We wish Bill Gates and all other entrepreneurs who have contributed greatly to the technological revolution the best. When, however, you look back on stock market results 20 years from now, among the most spectacular performers will be the corporations that
replaced the current educational system. As things were two decades ago in Tele-cosm stocks, most of these corporations have not yet been noticed and, in many cases, do not yet even exist. Watch for them.I predict that these will not be companies that are trying to use the new technologies as adjuncts to the current educational system. Nor will they be companies currently in the education business. These companies are too influenced by "experts'' to make a revolution.
At this time, three enormous forces are converging on the education industry - an industry that employs several million Americans at an annual cost of several hundred billion dollars.
The first of these forces is the advent of true global competition in a technological age in which education - both for the technologists and for the general public whose consumer and political whims affect the course of technology - has become an essential ingredient of personal and national survival. Up until now, the American educational system has controlled this force, but this control is drawing to an end. At present, American graduate schools of science and technology are filled with foreign students learning from American professors in their 50s and 60s. Soon these professors will retire and their students will establish world-class educational programs in other countries. Then America will no longer be able to depend upon its momentum. It will compete on a vast, level playing field with well-educated people in many countries.
The second force is the moral and intellectual decay of American tax-financed public schools and American universities. While this system still contains small islands of excellence and sanity, most of it is too far gone to salvage. It exists today largely on social momentum and lack of competition - a lack that will soon be filled by: The third force, which is the information revolution. There is just no remaining need for centralized educational facilities. The best introductory physics professor in the United States can now teach all of the physics students in the United States. (Actually, we probably will have a few dozen such professors to allow for students of different abilities and for competition in teaching methods.) I have seen one relatively primitive micro example of this future in our home school curriculum on 22 CD-ROMs. Six children on a remote Oregon farm now teach more than 25,000 students - at one-tenth the cost of other home school curriculums and one-hundredth the cost of tax-financed schools - and with unusually high academic standards.
These three - the ascendance of education as an essential of survival; the irreversible decay within American educational institutions; and the rise of technology that would make those institutions obsolete even if they were not in a debilitated state - are three massive trends that cannot be stopped and will soon cataclysmally merge.
Moreover, this revolutionary environment is ideally suited to the rise of an educational version of Microsoft - with a secondary industry of other companies whirling around its skirts. The current educators -including money moguls who are now buying up "education'' companies on the apparent theory that the more monkeys one has, the greater the chance that one will write a symphony - will not know what has buried them until it is far too late.
Deflation and unemployment in the education industry will send millions of "educators'' looking for honest work, while a few companies that effectively harness the new information technology to education will grow spectacularly.
It is popular now in high-tech circles to spawn "laws'' and "paradigms.'' The successes of Moore's Law and Gilder Telecosm paradigms have generated many imitators. If we had a snappy word for the revolution we will see in education ("Educosom?'' - perhaps readers have some suggestions) and a large enough audience to establish name recognition for it, we might have the fun of naming this revolution.
To be sure, it will have a name - and it will come - and our current schools and universities will be the slide rules of the future (about which we tell our grandchildren - partially to their disbelief).