Now more than ever we need to innovate to survive. The Artificial Intelligence Pandora’s Box has been opened. We will have practical humanoid robots by the end of the decade. High minimum wages are incentivizing automation in the service and manufacturing sectors. The number of instances where people can work remotely has skyrocketed. The world’s economy is rapidly being transformed. The only constant, it seems, is change.
What will we do when automation and AI displace millions of blue collar jobs? People with limited imaginations will have no idea. These are the same kind of people who in 1886 declared the automobile was a curiosity, or that television would never be popular, or in the early twentieth century predicted that the total market for the computer would be less than 20. This is the thinking that is bound by extrapolating the present into the future. But that is not how innovation works.
Innovation is not a smooth transition from one system to the next. It is a step function that radically alters the market. Remember Kodak? The digital camera obliterated the film industry. That smart phone in your pocket you can’t do without was beyond imagination at the turn of the century. Big changes often happen fast and they leave the destruction of old paradigms in their wake.
With every great shift, from steam engine to computer to robotics to AI there come the predictions of huge numbers of people without anything to do. Economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that technology would result in a 15 hour work week with the balance dedicated to leisure. One wonders if Keynes every studied people and what motivates them. So why don’t we have huge numbers of people with nothing to do because their jobs were obsoleted by technology? Obviously they found something else to do. They either created a new way to make money or went to work for someone who did. Every great enterprise began as an idea and it’s the creators of those ideas we need to cultivate.
We need to encourage innovation and at the core of innovation is the idea that you can do the impossible. Impossible until now. Every invention is by definition doing something that was never done before. It was impossible until someone did it.
Children are naturally inventive because they are not burdened by knowledge of the impossible. Consider the little third grade student who was sitting at her desk drawing when the teacher asked “Amy, what are you drawing?”
Amy responded “I’m drawing a picture of God.”
The teacher smiles and says “But Amy, nobody knows what God looks like.”
A slightly annoyed Amy replies “They will in a minute.”
I was asked by a group of teachers what they can do to foster innovation in their students. “That’s easy.” I said, “Stop beating it out of them.”
Our current schooling system was conceived at the height of the British Empire when the bureaucracy of the world was run using ships carrying messages on slips of paper. It was a requirement that both the sender and the receiver of those messages share a common language and understanding. Standardized schooling was a practical necessity and it thrived through the industrial revolution because it produced a uniform product: people who could take their place as both factory workers and consumers. Their skills, habits, and appetites were forged into relative sameness by a rigid system of schooling. Schooling begets uniformity, like a school of fish. Innovation and creativity were necessarily suppressed and rote memorization of knowledge was rewarded because knowledge was precious and expensive to acquire.
It was in this frame that our Idaho Constitution was written. Article IX, Section 1 says:
“The stability of a republican form of government depending mainly upon the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legislature of Idaho, to establish and maintain a general, uniform and thorough system of public, free common schools.”
The reason for common schools was not enlightenment or prosperity. The prime reason common schools exist is to ensure the stability of a republican form of government. Government schools’ first design priority is the survival of the government.
It is reasonable to ask if public schools are doing the job that justifies their existence. Can high school graduates explain how a republican form of government operates, why it is superior to other forms of government, and what contributes to its stability? Not likely. Our public schools are failing their prime directive.
Monopolies have little to no incentive to innovate, which is why the cell phone was not invented by a telephone company. We should not expect the innovations required for modernization of our school system to come from within that system. The existing school bureaucracy is unable or unwilling to recognize it is inadequate for the so is clueless about how to adapt. Lacking a viable solution the fallback position is to blame a lack of money and demand more.
The only way to bring our children’s education system into the information age is to allow and encourage competition. School choice will open the doors to the marketplace of new ideas and the best ideas will quickly percolate to the top.
The bureaucrats who are ensconced in the status quo will howl predictions of doom and gloom. They will hold your children and their teachers as shields against improvement. They know that once viable solutions arrive, their time at the helm is done. Don’t listen to them.
To prosper in the 21st century, our children need more than an 18th century education system. Let’s open the door to innovation and unleash the power of free market competition, the power of school choice. Your children deserve a choice.
It’s just common sense.
