On the Unexpected Limit in Education
N. Monk, Futurist and Philosopher
Modern education is going to face a new limit because of the accelerating rates of human progress, technology, and innovation. This limit will be a new limit unlike something the forefathers of education might have suspected, this new limit will be a biological one.
While computational technology is still following Moore’s Law; which simply put means the number of transistors in an integrated circuit double about every two years, technology is not the only thing that is progressing at a nearly exponential rate. Human innovation is also following a similar trend. To quote Ray Kurzweil “So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century, it will be more like 20,000 years of progress”. However, Kurzweil was not the only person to notice these exponential trends, other thinkers such as the American polymath, Buckminster Fuller, have also shown through historical observation an accelerating trend of knowledge and innovation. More simplistic examples of this can be found in the lives of students, and even professors now.
Consider this, in 1888, the notions of computers had not been conceived yet, even Albert Einstein’s ideas of relativity or Planck’s ideas of quantum mechanics had not even been thought about yet. Modern psychology in that time would have just begun and been around for about a century, which is young for a theoretical field. Even in the medical field modern surgical techniques and life-saving technology were not around yet. After looking through exams from the University of Sidney 1888, physics, in particular, I realized that I would have been able to pass the entrance exam to the university in grade ten or eleven. Not because I am smart or some sort of genius, quite the contrary, it is because most of the stuff I was learning in physics would not be taught to the 1888 students until their second year or so. In other words, as part of modern physics, I was required to learn what would have been somewhat advanced for them in my high school levels of physics. An easier example is Optics. In Brandon University it is considered a second-year course, in 1888 it was considered a third or fourth-year course. Even the required courses for a major now is much more difficult, not only because you have to learn almost all that was taught in almost half the time, but because you have to also learn the modern theories.
As part of a 4-year major honours in Physics at Brandon University, it is required that students take computer science courses. Students in 1888 would have no conception of a computer at that time. Thus, already physics students to succeed, need to also learn about an entire field that did not exist a little over a century ago.
However, this human progress is not the problem, nor is it the Universities fault either. This accelerating innovation is a good thing. The problem is that while technology and knowledge are expanding exponentially around us, humans themselves are not. The human body evolves quite slowly. This will become a severely limiting factor because once the information demands reach a certain point, people will be overloaded and will be unable to keep up. Humans are limited by their brain and the speeds at which neural connections are made, or the rate of electrical impulses fire. Even the human memory will be a severely limiting factor because it is not recollective it is reconstructive. It takes a relatively long time for people to remember things long-term.
Conclusively, one can realize that for humans to continue to keep up with the accelerating trends, humanity needs to seek to find solutions around their biological limits. If we do not, we will be a mere remnant of the past left behind and forgotten.