WITH DISRUPTIONS IN major industries changing the structure of daily economic life, all of us should sense very clearly by now that the education industry – if you will allow me to call it an industry – is a ripe fruit that is about to fall in the digital storm that has been blowing around the world since the turn of this century.
Education is indeed an industry, not only because it provides jobs, involves an enormous infrastructure of production and consumption of input and output, but also because the industrial society that gave birth to it has, over time, connoted very strongly for us what knowledge is, and what the point of it is. Being an industry, it mass produces and it is the long-term effects of mass education that we should consider if we are to take full advantage of the disruptions.
The Industrial Revolution once created the same sort of anxiety that many of us feel today, namely, will machines not take away jobs and leave most of us with nothing to do?
