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Vendredi 27
Mai 2005
Putting More Into Knowledge
Triggered by Internet, continuing adult education may well
become our greatest growth industry.
by Peter Drucker
Education is already grabbing a major chunk of America’s gross
national product. I believe that the U.S. now spends around $1
trillion on education and training. This number will increase
rapidly, but the growth won’t be in traditional schools, which
currently take about 10% of the GNP (kindergarten through high
school, 6%; colleges and universities, 4%). The growth will be
in continuing adult education. Online delivery is the trigger
for this growth, but the demand for lifetime education stems
from profound changes in society. In simplest terms, people
who are already highly educated and high achievers
increasingly sense that they are not keeping up. They’ve come
back to school because they want and need new ways of looking
at things outside of their competencies. They want to learn to
see things whole. Many of them are there to reflect on their
experiences, to see them in a broader perspective. They need
this perspective to cope with today’s bewildering
technological and economic changes. The market for continuing
education is already much bigger than most people realize. A
good guess is that it already accounts for 6% of GNP in the
U.S. and is rapidly getting there in other developed
countries. It is going to get a lot higher.
Why
this explosion of demand ? We live in an economy where
knowledge, not buildings and machinery, is the chief resource
and where knowledge-workers make up the biggest part of the
work force. Until well into the 20th century, most workers
were manual workers. Today in the U.S., only about 20% do
manual work. Of the remainder, nearly half, 40% of our total
work force, are knowledge-workers. Again, the proportions are
roughly similar for other developed countries. Workers have
always had to gain skills, but knowledge is different from
skill. Skills change very slowly. My Dutch ancestors- drucker
means "printer" in Dutch- ran a print shop in Amsterdam from
1517 until around 1730. In all those centuries none of them
had to learn a new skill. It was the same in most industries.
In dress-making there hasn’t been a new skill required since a
Hungarian invented the buttonhole in the 11th century.
For
most of human history a skilled worker had learned what he
needed to learn by the time his apprenticeship was finished at
18 or 19. Not so with the modern knowledge-worker. Physicians,
medical technicians in the pathology lab, computer-repair
people, lawyers and human resource managers can scarcely keep
up with developments in their fields. This is why so many
professional associations put continuing education among their
highest priorities.
Keeping up with knowledge and seeing the world whole mattered
less in the days of lifetime employment. When young people
took a job at Metropolitan Life or the telephone company or
General Motors or Royal Dutch / Shell or Mitsubishi, they
often expected to remain there until retirement.
As
giant companies spin off manufacturing operations in favor of
outsourcing, job turnover mounts. A young person entering the
work force in 2000, with a possible working life of 50 years,
has little expectation and almost no chance of working for the
same company even a decade hence. In this world people must
take responsibility for their own futures. They cannot simply
count on ascending a career ladder.
A
great thing about knowledge is that it is mobile and
transferable. It belongs to you, not to your employer or the
state. And it is highly marketable today.
With a potential market for continuing adult education thus
embracing at least 40% of the typical developed-country’s work
force, conventional institutions no longer suffice. They are
too expensive and insufficiently accessible in a physical
sense. In southern California, where I teach, the highways are
clogged. People who have families and are already working a
full day can ill afford the commuting time to get to a
traditional school. They need accessible and flexible ways of
learning.
Already colleges and universities are putting some of their
best teachers and their best sources on the Internet. I myself
just produced ten teaching programs to be marketed on the web.
Students can access this sort of material from their homes at
their own convenience.
People in the developing countries will be able to use the
Internet to access the developed-world’s best brains and
valuable data, without the expense of building and staffing
great universities. Bright and ambitious young men and women
of the emerging-market countries will get first-class
educations without leaving home—thereby addressing the
brain-drain problem that has helped to widen the gap between
rich and poor nations.
Online teaching, however, is more than just time-efficient and
cost-efficient. It is more flexible than the classroom in that
the student not getting the point right away can replay the
material. The interactivity of online education, its facility
for blending graphics and pictures with the spoken word, give
it an advantage over the typical classroom. With the
interactivity of the Internet, we get the equivalent of a
one-to-one teacher-student ratio.
Judging by historical experience, the new online continuing
education of the already well-educated will not replace
traditional education. New channels of distribution are
typically additions and complements rather than replacements.
Television, for example, did not kill radio or magazines or
books. The new medium, TV, walked off with much of the growth,
but the other media continued to thrive and grow, too.
Online continuing education is creating a new and distinct
educational realm, and it is the future of education. There is
a global market here that is potentially worth hundreds of
billions of dollars.
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