Don?t bother taking an apple to school to give your favorite teacher, unless you want to leave it in front of a machine. The schoolteacher is about to join the sorry ranks of the service station attendant, the elevator operator, and the telephone operators whose professions have been rendered useless by technology.
The next big social trend in this country will be to replace teachers with computers. It is being forced by the financial crisis afflicting states and municipalities, which are facing red ink as far as the eye can see. From a fiscal point of view, of the 50 US states, we really have 30 Portugals, 10 Italys, 10 Irelands, 5 Greeces, and 5 Spains.
The painful cost cutting, layoffs, and downsizing that has swept the corporate area for the past 30 years is now being jammed down the throat of the public sector, the last refuge of slothful management and indifferent employees. Some 60% of high school students are already exposed to online educational programs, which enable teachers to handle far larger class sizes than the 40 students now common in California.
It makes it far easier to impose pay for productivity incentives on teachers, like linking teacher pay to student test scores, as a performance review is only a few mouse clicks away. These programs also qualify for government funding programs, like ?Race to the Top.? Costly textbooks can be dispensed with.
The alternative is to bump classroom sizes up to 80, or close down schools altogether. State deficits are so enormous that I can see public schools shutting down, privatizing their sports programs, and sending everyone home with a laptop. The cost savings would be huge. No more pep rallies, prom nights, or hanging around your girlfriend?s locker. Of course, our kids may turn out a little different, but they appear to be at the bottom of our current list of priorities.
