Recent articles in education journals - Brief Article

Recent articles in education journals have referred to Y2K, or the Year 2000 problem. Unless you've been living in a tree, you know all about this computer glitch -- and you may even be stocking your basement with fuel and food (and back issues of TECHNOS for your reading pleasure). The travel industry has been saturated with material; the financial industry has been obsessed with the problem. Governments are spending billions of dollars to address the problem, and the healthcare industry is working vigorously on solutions.

In fact, the Y2K issue has been addressed to the point of exasperation in every industry I know of -- except education. In education it is a whisper; nothing compared to assessment or federal funding. And this is with good reason. If computers fail at airports, lives could be lost. If government computers shut down, there could be widespread hunger as people await late subsistence checks. If bank computers quit working, all commerce could cease, and people could end up out of work. If school computers quit working, on the other hand, teachers would be forced to give a reading assignment. Not much of an emergency there.

Even if a school could not operate because climate controls quit working or buses couldn't be scheduled, the cost to society would be minimal, and a low-tech fix would be very doable. This is because, unlike most American enterprises, education has not integrated technology into its core activities. People have not been replaced by computers in education, and they have not come to rely on them in the classroom the way the rest of us do in our offices and factories. For the first time in 30 years, it looks as though education's reluctance to embrace technology may pay off.

Schools may also be glad that they didn't put telephones in classrooms, if those newfangled things quit working on January 1, 2000. Sometimes it pays to be archaic.

Michael F. Sullivan
Executive Director
Agency for Instructional Technology
Publisher, TECHNOS Quarterly

COPYRIGHT 1999 Agency for Instructional Technology
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group