WORDWAR

Education

Obsolescence in the Schools

For decades we have been hearing about all the leisure time we will have in the new Communications Age. Perhaps the techno-peasants will, but not those at the cutting edge. Why? Because people working in the sunrise industries are finding that the rate of change requires them to spend almost one day a week just to keep up with what's new. This is especially true in computer companies, but also applies in such fields as biotechnology and advanced medical services.
As you look into this phenomenon, it is easy to see why traditional educational institutions cannot function in a new environment where information travels at the speed of light. Never mind governments that are still operating from manuals written in the 1930s and 1960s; let's take teachers. In times of little change, it was easy to keep up with that change. But as change accelerated, it changed the very environment itself. Where once educators had 130 years to learn about, say, electricity (after the invention of the electric motor, for example), today they have just weeks to learn what's new. The educational system isn't structured to handle rapid change. The students are aware of that.
Perhaps even more important is that those who do keep abreast of change just don't have the time to become teachers or even to train teachers. By the time that would occur in the old format, the thing they dropped out of in order to teach would itself be obsolete. Look at the speed at which we went from vacuum tubes to transistors to the microchip to integrated circuits to fifth generation artificial intelligence computers. Already biological and neural computers are pushing the frontiers of the sixth and seventh generation.
Knowledge is now really worthwhile only if it comes from the cutting edge. By the time it is passed on by an obsolete method, it is itself obsolete. Virtually anything passed on in print is outdated. Are you aware that it sometimes takes eight years to get a textbook into the educational pipeline in North America? The book is obsolete the day it is written, never mind the day it appears in the classroom, yet we're supposedly training kids for the future with this material.
Many universities are not aware of the speed at which knowledge is expanding. The mission statement of the president of the University of British Columbia, titled "Toward the Pacific Century: The President's Report," published in 1988, stated that knowledge was doubling every fifteen years (without citing a reference). A few years after the UBC report, the prestigious Futurist magazine reported that human knowledge was doubling every twenty months.
North American schools simply aren't aware of what is happening. Of course, there are minute pockets of awareness, but they are minimal, and educators with an eye on the future have little opportunity to be heard in the rigid higher levels of academia, where the rulers usually are not willing to give up their cherished beliefs in the long-gone educational dogma of yesterday. Hence, my view that the present educational system will not evolve but collapse.
Only those who learn to dance with electrons will thrive. Many others will not even survive. Would you be at your present level of influence and affluence today if you could not read or write? You needed to know the three Rs of the Industrial Age -- reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic -- to survive. Today, if you have not acquired the knowledge of the new three Rs -- RAM, ROM, and run -- you are electronically illiterate. Our schools, instead of preparing students for the future, imprison them in the past.

Does Literacy Matter?

Back in 1989, U.S. News & World Report was calling for action against "The Illiteracy Epidemic." There are twenty-five million Americans who cannot read or write. Another forty-five million are functionally illiterate. More than 25 percent of the population is not equipped mentally to handle the Industrial Age, never mind the Information Age. In Canada the figures may be slightly better but the problem remains.
Criteria for literacy change with the times. One hundred years ago, as the Agricultural Age was winding down, the ability to merely write your own name put you in the "literate" class. Fifty years later, as the Industrial Age came into full flower, a sixth-grade education provided the same status. Today the bare minimum for Information-Age entry requires reading and writing skills at the level of a high school graduate. The trouble now is that students are graduating from high school unable to read and write adequately.
To compete and to maintain present levels of influence and affluence, North Americans must come up with innovative methods to update those among the population who are woefully behind and to carry the entire population to higher levels of knowledge. The alternative? Have you ever witnessed rural peasants grubbing out a living from the dry desert soil in the mountains of Mexico and Peru? Their ancestors were the Aztecs and the Incas, rulers of advanced civilizations and lords of all their known world.
Education is the crucial factor. As Mortimer B. Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, correctly points out, "In the post-industrial era, when the majority of people in the work force make a living with their minds, not their hands, it is education -- more than coal or steel or even capital -- that is the key to our economic future."
In Japan, IQs of over 130 are recorded among 10 percent of the high school population. Literacy there has reached new heights, and instant communications and utilization of information have become commonplace. With a relatively homogeneous native population, and citizens who speak only one language in their homeland (unlike Canada or the U.S.), the Japanese are capable of communications that are faster and more comprehensive.
Yet it is not time for total despair. Illiteracy has its advantages. I have found that the best young programmers are kids who can't spell. They naturally spell phonetically, as robots do. What was once a liability becomes an asset in another age.
Literacy is bound to become less important in years to come. For some time now, I have had what looks like a hippie headband that picks up my alpha and beta waves. Using biofeedback, I can turn on my computer, tell it to run a program, and command my computer to print. Today a wire runs from the headband to the computer and its peripherals. Tomorrow that wire will not be necessary.
My satellite dishes have a device known as a Low-Noise Amplifier or LNA, which takes the very faint signal (quieter than a snowflake falling) from outer space and amplifies it up to 200,000 times. I get all the color, pictures, and sound required. Imagine a modification of such a device, perhaps the size of a hearing aid, that could amplify your thought waves. It might have to amplify your thought waves two or three million times, but then you could create miracles on command. You could instruct a bulldozer to move mountains, right from your easy chair. No reading or writing necessary.
I suggest a different look at print illiteracy. Just because part of the population does not know how to read and write it doesn't mean those people will be unable to obtain knowledge levels that are viable for the twenty-first century.

Teaching for Tomorrow

I have on my desk a fat, forty-eight-page folder of courses published by a local school board on its continuing education program. It's great: more than one thousand courses, from crafts and cosmetic surgery to Tagalog, the language of the Philippines. These courses are offered during the day, in the evening, even on weekends. They make learning easy, and the student fees are low.
But is anyone teaching about tomorrow? Like most schools, this one teaches the known. Today's marketplace offers premiums to those who search out the unknown. This process requires a knowledge navigator, but our schools aren't producing any.
In an age where change is constant, where the most secure job can be wafted out of existence by the breeze of the next technological advance, our schools aren't teaching students how to adapt to rapid change. No earthling is capable of welding better than a robot, yet many schools still teach welding. With the electronic camera about to devastate professional photographers, they still teach photography. With ceramic materials replacing metal cutlery, they teach metallurgy. New knowledge and technological advances now move at the speed of light, yet our schools aren't even trying to develop the people who can survive and lead the way to tomorrow.
A recent letter from a gentleman in Calgary, Alberta, mentions that he stopped building office buildings just before the recession because he realized that, with corporate downsizing and advances in data storage, corporations wouldn't require more buildings. Yet no politician saw this coming, or believed anybody who had that vision. No government drew attention to the change (or wanted to stop the tax revenue). They all thought alike. This gentleman listened, watched, and then made his decision. He survived with his fortune intact, not because he had learned about the past but because he looked to the future.
Does your local school have a course in futurism? Does any teacher, school board member, or politician even begin to understand the possibilities and implications of the Communications Age? Ask around. Phone your local school board or teachers' union. You'll be shocked.

Grads with Warranties

Starting in 1994, the Los Angeles Unified School District -- the second largest in the United States, with a student population of 640,000 -- will send its graduates out into the world with a warranty, along with the usual diploma. The education warranty will work just like a car warranty. If the hired student's skills do not match those promised in the warranty, the school will absorb the cost of bringing that student up to the required level. The idea is also under consideration in Maryland and Massachusetts.
This innovation is not unexpected. For the past decade, business in both the United States and Canada has been telling the educational establishment that a mere high school diploma no longer carries the same value as in the past. Time magazine reported that Pacific Bell complained that "more than half of its applicants for entry-level jobs, such as operators, fail a simple seventh-grade reading and math test. Many others companies have reported similar experiences." A large number of Canadian business operations have been making similar complaints for some time.
The Los Angeles warranty covers more than basic reading, mathematics, and effective communications. Students must also have adequate thinking skills. They must be able to solve problems, reason logically, and describe mental visualizations. They must possess such personal qualities as integrity, self-management, initiative, and responsibility. These graduates will be expected to know how to budget time and resources such as money, materials, and staff. They must know, not learn on the job, how to lead, negotiate, and work on a team. They must know how to use technology to access, organize, and interpret data, how to understand and improve social and organizational systems, and they must be able to select and apply trouble-shooting technology. If they don't, the employer can bounce them back. And if they don't measure up when they return, as with a car, you stop dealing with that school and its product.
Gabriel Cortina, assistant superintendent on the Labor Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), doesn't beat around the bush. "In the business world, sharing responsibility for a project is called teamwork. In classrooms, the way we teach today, it's called cheating." Many business executives say the warranty is needed and that the educational establishment in Los Angeles has finally been willing to confront a serious problem. It will be fascinating to see how well the program works, and whether other jurisdictions in the U.S. and Canada follow suit.

Third World Leapfrog

These words of British-born Arthur C. Clarke, the twentieth century's leading living visionary, appear on a sign in Sri Lanka: "2,000 years ago, Sri Lanka was one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world." Today it's a Third World country with fifteen million citizens. Does that mean it's doomed to spend the next 2,000 years as a have-not and know-not country? Not if Clarke has his way.
These days Clarke is helping the country make some bold attempts to leapfrog Industrial Age mentality. The author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and more than forty other publications, is aiding this renaissance on the tiny Indian Ocean island of which he is a long-time resident. Just outside Colombo, the capital, he spearheaded the construction of the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Modern Technologies by donating the prize money from his prestigious Marconi Award to the school. With the government's help, he hopes that this institution will grow into a leading center for Third World development of new technologies.
Ironically, the lack of what were previously called Industrial Age advantages now appear to be a benefit to such countries. With no big financial investment in old-world technologies and with no huge educational bureaucracy in the way, change can happen quickly. Not blinded by the defective vision of the status quo, Sri Lankans may have found the better way to go.
India is in a similar position. With a population closing in on a billion and a Third World economy, India does not have the funds to provide the books and computers, never mind the school buildings and staff, to give its burgeoning population a survival learning system of the old-fashioned sort. Like Sri Lanka, however, India is thinking smarter. The government is sending out TV sets to the 750,000 villages in the country. There the "head man" sets up an open-air shelter for the TV set. A small low-cost satellite dish brings in the signal. In most cases, the village doesn't have the electricity to power the set, so a bicycle with a generator accompanies each TV. The local contest is to see which kid can peddle the longest supplying power, before the screen starts to flicker. Overnight, people who have never seen a video image leave behind the old ways and enter the new.
That's what I call public education.

Technology and Education

In our globalizing world, emerging technologies have done wonders for productivity in manufacturing, medicine, biotechnology, and engineering, to mention just a few of the many sectors affected. Yet schools, among the most conservative of institutions, have generally failed to embrace these changes. New jobs are waiting for trained workers in some industries, but our schools are not training them. Some industries have set up their own training schools because public school graduates simply aren't aware of what those industries are all about.
The problem is serious, and can only become more so. The increasing rate of change in new technology means that schools will have more and more difficulty keeping up. Technology In Education: Looking Toward 2020 (edited by Raymond S. Nickerson and Philip P. Zodhiate), though a very good book on this subject, was in some ways obsolete by the time it reached wide distribution.
Changes in information storage alone have moved from advanced microfiche, where a printed newspaper page was reduced to fingernail size, to optical storage cards the size of a credit card that hold twenty thousand pages of information. Within three years of that advance both Grolier and Britannica announced that their respective twenty-one and twenty-nine volume encyclopedia sets were available on 4.5-inch compact disks. Tufts University followed with a crystal the size of a sugar cube that held the information equivalent of ten thousand one-megabyte floppy disks, only to be outclassed by Cambridge University, which put the whole Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin. Since the announcement of that old-fashioned development, SERODS have appeared on the scene. A major library can now be held in your hand.
This is just one field. Such change is occurring everywhere. As mentioned, when Digital Equipment Corporation of Maryland built the VAX 780 minicomputer, it was three feet high, three feet wide, and six feet long. It cost $30,000 to manufacture. Six years later the same company came out with a microchip the size of a fingernail that cost $300 to make. It replaced the VAX 780. The highly skilled, highly paid workers who produced and serviced the VAX 780 were no longer required. Change, like death, can come on swift wings.
The old ways, the expensive ways, no longer work. They must be replaced by dramatic changes in our thinking. Such changes are happening elsewhere on the planet. The more forward-thinking peoples are no smarter than we are, but they have realized that nothing will ever again be like it was in the past. In many cases people in the emerging countries in Asia didn't have any "good old days" to look back on, so it was easier for them to adapt. In North America, meanwhile, trying to hang on, trying to pressure governments to support long-dead concepts in manufacturing, services, education, or even government itself, is a waste of effort, money, and time.
Chester Finn, a Vanderbilt University professor, comments, "There are only two major institutions in America today where, if you walk into them, you would feel like you could be there a century ago. They are schools and churches."
I think he's right. The public education system should be preparing us for the next century, not keeping us mired in the past. The possibilities are greater than our teachers have been trained to comprehend. How will we compete with countries that have seen the future and are prepared to enhance it?

Can Johnny Spell?

Are you old enough to remember when automatic turn indicators were not permitted on cars? How about when ballpoint pens were not allowed in schools? Eighty years ago you weren't even allowed to take an automobile into the province of Prince Edward Island!
Remember the days, more recently, when kids couldn't take hand-held calculators into school? They were forced to use paper and pencil -- because it had always been done that way. Some schools still prohibit kids from taking their own laptop computers into classrooms. What if the kids came up with the answer more quickly than the teacher?
Teachers and parents often bemoan the fact that Johnny can't spell, and the computer is often blamed. The fact is, though, wasting weeks and months learning how to spell may not be productive. In the Communications Age it may be more profitable to spend that time learning how to think.
In that case, how will kids ever know how to spell? A California software company, Working Software Inc., already has a range of programs that include "Lookup," which instantly finds the correct spelling for any word. The two dictionaries built into this program contain 93,000 and 60,000 words. Using this program is much faster than reaching for a Gutenberg-style dictionary. The program contains a "guess" function, which makes guesses based on phonetic spelling. It also catches common typos and uses a wild-card method to locate all words beginning and ending with certain specified letters. For example, if you entered "comm?er", it would find all words beginning with "comm" and ending with "er."
Two other programs from Working Software contain a legal dictionary and a medical dictionary. Still another program in the same family, "Findswell," will find anything you have placed in your computer's memory. Try that with your own head!
This isn't the only example of why we may not need to teach kids how to spell. When robots are programmed to speak, they are "taught" to use phonetic spelling. They spell a word the way it sounds, just like humans often do when they misspell a word. Robots love that intelligent method. Take the word "laugh": if you were an intelligent robot, wouldn't you see right away that "laf" is the way to go? Humans, with their correct spelling, may soon find their knowledge a handicap in dealing with robots -- or the future.
The new race of neutral computers will not seek perfection (in spelling or anything else) at a high price in time and cost, but it will find the "almost perfect" answer almost instantly and practically for free. Perhaps we ought to be taking the same approach in our classrooms.

The Whittle Phenomenon

Since 1989, Whittle Communications of Knoxville, Tennessee, has been installing free equipment to bring satellite transmissions to American classrooms. Whittle has taken the reins and is turning the educational establishment around. Its program, Channel One, is a daily twelve-minute news, geography, and information program designed to make the world relevant to teenagers. It is the only daily newscast produced exclusively for secondary school students. Channel One is beamed via satellite to participating schools every day of the school year. There is no cost to the school. Two of the daily twelve minutes of programming is advertising. If a school guarantees to broadcast at least nine out of ten shows to the students, it gets free satellite dishes, free VCRs, free TVs, and the free programming.
Starting with a six-school test program in March 1989, Channel One had expanded by the end of 1990 to 6,000 schools. Within seventy-five days, there were 8,216 schools in forty-seven states being set up to receive programs -- 615 in one week. Today more than 10,000 schools, 300,000 classrooms, and 6.1 million students are getting education from the medium they've grown up with. It's not just passive entertainment. In September 1991, the state of Michigan and the Whittle Educational Network held a live video-teleconference to help 10,000 mathematics teachers prepare for a statewide exam -- the largest number of schools (515) ever to participate in such an endeavor.
Created by Christopher Whittle in 1970, Whittle Communications now has 1,200 employees and does more than $200 million a year in business. It produces magazines and wall media (e.g., posters). It has twelve information centers, two book series, and three television systems. Whittle is on the way up. It's providing what the market wants, not pushing the old mush down students' throats in an antiquated system. Time-Warner Inc., the media giant with deep pockets, is a 50 percent owner; there's no capital shortage here. It's not available in Canada because of Canadian telecommunications regulations.
Whittle points out that "when Edison invented electric illumination, he didn't tinker with candles to make them burn better. Instead, he created something brilliantly new: the light bulb." Whittle Communications is lighting the way along a new educational path. It will be starting a new nationwide school system, offering contract services for public and private schools, and developing educational software, hardware, and the infrastructure (satellite dishes, VCRs, TVs) along with an educational-research laboratory already under way.
By 1996, the company envisages having up to two hundred campuses with 150,000 students age one to six, and perhaps a thousand schools and two million students by the turn of the century. It will spend $60 million to get this Edison Project going and $2.5 billion for the one hundred to two hundred campuses planned for 1996. It does not intend to compete for government grants.
Whittle hired Benno Schmidt, then president of Yale University, to be president and chief executive officer of the Edison Project. Why would he accept such a post? "The schools of America are in difficulty and need fundamental structural change," he says, "not tinkering around the edges." Hear, hear!

The Ultimate School

We have all learned a lot from our cars. Most of what we learned came not from the car itself, but from our using it to get to places we hadn't been before. We have driven to mountain tops, beside rivers, along coastal plains, through city streets, and under bridges. All that data stored in our craniums thanks to our travels gave us insight and perspective and something we didn't have before -- the ability to think differently.
People flying airplanes, helicopters, and space shuttles have acquired additional data, perspective, and insight. When we see something from a height, we see it differently and think about it differently. Spend some time in a submarine and watch how quickly new thinking patterns emerge. Every exploratory experience encourages a change in thinking.
What about education? We are still pushing the old three Rs, even though the parents of today's school children are already receiving 70 percent of their information from television. Schooling is supposed to prepare us for handling the world we will enter. But that world has changed faster than teachers can be trained. In many cases today, such as computer operation, television, and pattern recognition, the kids are more expert than their teachers. Shouldn't this tell us something?
A cyberspace exploratory world -- one in which piezoelectric vibro-tactile actuators respond to every feeling possible in the "real" world -- will allow us to learn at a speed and a level never before possible. Consider a stove. Adults know a stove is hot, probably because they once got burned. In a cybernetic world of virtual reality, you don't have to go through the pain to understand. You experience the burn, the heat, and even the pain -- but without the damage.
How many kids have stuck their fingers in a light socket? A great thrill if you live to tell about it. Now you can. In a virtual room with a virtual light socket, you will receive the same apparent shock, but it won't kill you. Your mind will indelibly imprint that experience so you'll know better in the future.
We all did the dissect-the-frog-in-biology-class bit. It's not popular anymore because of enhanced sensibilities and the environment movement. But why not dissect a virtual frog in a virtual laboratory? That's painless learning for all, including the frog. Many kids find history a bore. It won't be, if you're high in the rigging of a pirate ship about to rape and plunder Kingston, Jamaica, or in Parliament hearing Disraeli speak, or in Philadelphia listening to Ben Franklin describe his electrical experiment with a kite.
All this is now possible to a limited extent. Soon it will be much more realistic. When virtual reality merges with holographic projection (not unlike the marriage of television to the VCR), stand back! The world will change faster than it has during any previous technological advance. It will be the biggest thing in education since the alphabet. Cyberspace will become the ultimate school. The sooner the educational establishment wakes up to the possibilities, the better equipped our young people will be for the world that awaits them.

Nintendo Learning

"I think the school is an extremely harmful institution. ... I think the schools do more harm than Nintendo." These are the words of Seymour A. Papert, considered by some to be the world's leading expert on the use of computers in education. He's with the renowned Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Why do students leave school? Mostly because of boredom. Yet Nintendo can hold a kid's interest for hours. Maybe we are doing something wrong. Papert believes the key question is: What makes some people become so passionately interested in something? He invented the computer programming language Logo and has recently received a research grant from Nintendo. He told the Toronto Star that he "has made no promises to Nintendo, although he does not rule out the possibility of developing educational software for its game machines." He adds that schools have failed to stay up-to-date in adapting new technologies to the classroom. His new goal: to make such classroom subjects as writing and history as alluring to children as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Super Mario Brothers.
For the past five years, someone else has been asking similar questions. He's not a professor, but a successful businessman. Jack Taub is founder of the world's first information utility, The Source, which he sold for megabucks to Reader's Digest. He is now founder and chairman of the International Education and Information Utility. He believes his creation will make a child, when given the option of going to a theme park or delving into his magical computer world of knowledge, choose the computer. Let's hope he's right.
Meanwhile, the disinterest in public education is staggering. In British Columbia, the drop-out figures are almost unbelievable: out of 476,000 students, 38 percent drop out before they enter high school; and 78 percent of those who start high school drop out before entering college. Of those who enter college, 75 percent drop out before receiving a degree.
The Globe and Mail reported that even the Toronto Board of Education has finally realized something is up. The board is now "quizzing students to see why they have turned their backs on traditional classrooms." Students said things like, "[School] buildings ... [imply] that students are animals and can't be trusted to respect public property," and "Student Council is really just the dance committee" and has no power. Others felt that they were "always going to assemblies" (echoing office workers who complain that they're always going to meetings).
If you think it has to do with money, you're wrong. Canada spends twice per capita on education as Japan does. The 1990 U.S. State Education Performance Chart shows graduation rates still dropping and performance on college entrance exams still falling, although spending on education is increasing -- 21 percent after inflation last year.
Can people like Papert and Taub revive our young people's interest in public education? They've got the right idea and the right attitude. Technology will play as important a role in the classroom as it already plays in the world at large.

Classroom Innovations

When was the last time you got any real understanding of a child's progress in school from reading a traditional report card? Did it show what he or she was learning? Could it express his or her enthusiasm, or lack of it? Did it show the way he or she approaches a problem? What did it reveal about the school itself?
The parents of students at a class at San Diego State University in California now get grades and what lies behind them on their home television from videocassette report cards. Ninety-five percent of the parents receiving the modern video report cards approved of their use. Now the parents can really see how well, or otherwise, their offspring are performing. Students have to request the video critiques and provide blank tapes. Currently the tapes run about thirty to forty minutes. They include classroom activities, perhaps showing the student doing work or discussing something, as well as evaluations of his or her performance and work habits.
Not all educators think it's a great idea. Glen Broom, acting chairman at the same university's journalism department, is not a fan. He claims that it takes too much time to prepare such a report: "You would not have time to do your job." Broom also objects to sending video reports to parents. "We are dealing with students here," he states. "My client is the student, not the student's parents." If students volunteer and participate, however, how can that be an invasion of privacy?
According to Professor Donald Sneed, who heads the class, the new method outshines the old. "The standard university report card today is a computer printout, a piece of paper that only says A, B, C, D, or F," he explains. "There is no elaboration on why the grade was assigned. On videotape, you can provide much more information. You can even zoom in on papers to provide specific examples of a student's work." Probably the greatest indirect benefit is what students learn about communications skills while helping to develop their own video report cards.
Another classroom innovation is the copyboard, first developed by Okidata. The copyboard is a large white board, much like the old-fashioned blackboard, easily wheeled into class. It comes in two sizes. The large model is roughly three feet by four feet; the smaller model is three by two. The teacher or instructor uses special markers in blue, black, green, or red and writes directly on the board.
Don't bother taking notes. Pay attention and listen. Chemical reactions, complicated medical information, football plays, schematic diagrams for engineers or architects -- the copyboard remembers them all. When the speaker is finished, he counts the students in class, hits a button, and out come clean copies of whatever was written on the copyboard. And like an old-fashioned blackboard, it wipes clean with an eraser.

Parlez-Vous?

According to Charles Berlitz, who should know, there are 2,796 languages spoken on this planet. Governments, especially in Canada, have spent countless millions on language training in the schools. But is language training necessary in the Communications Age? Could we be putting that time and money to better use in preparing our young people for the world that awaits them?
In British Columbia, where I live, it costs $7,000 a year to put a student through high school, which works out to about six dollars per student per hour. The cost is about $800 per month (including teachers' salaries, school overhead, etc.) for a student to get twenty hours of language instruction.
There is a better way. Arthur Wright, from Inglewood, Australia, suggests that, if students want to learn Spanish, for example, we send them to Guatemala. There, for about $400 each a month, they would get room and board with a local family; six hours of tuition a day and up to another ten hours a day with Spanish-speaking hosts; one teacher per student.
Do these kids sit in a dull classroom listening to a non-Spanish teacher? No. Their teacher/guide takes them around town, visiting shops, libraries, restaurants, and so forth. They learn the way the language is really spoken. They learn it quickly because their environment forces them to. After one month of this total immersion, students usually speak Spanish more fluently than students who have attended North American public education language classes for five or six years.
If we want students to learn a second language, there's a better way. But are second and third languages going to be needed in the future? Fujitsu, Japan's largest computer company, has developed the "universal translator." It can translate Japanese into English and vice versa at the rate of one thousand words per minute. It can translate half a dozen languages simultaneously. The blind can hear the program and the deaf can read it. A printout is available if you so desire, in the language of your choice. Will people want to learn another language when there is no longer any economic incentive to do so -- when a machine can efficiently translate for you?
The major Japanese telephone service (NTT) recently announced that it will offer an automatic translation service by 1995. You will phone Japan and speak the language of your choice. People on the other end will hear only Japanese. They will reply in their native tongue, but you will hear English, French, Italian, German -- whatever language you prefer.
For skeptics, I sometimes show at my seminars a videotape from a satellite transmission showing a Kenyan broadcasting from Japan to a Canadian in Iqaluit, Northwest Territories. The Kenyan is speaking Swahili. The Canadian is speaking Inuktitut. Because the translation is digitized and synthesized, one person could have been blind and the other deaf, and they still would have understood each other! Such advances in technology suggest that the money we spend on language training could possibly be put to better use.