Page 229 - The Drucker Lectures

210 [ The Drucker Lectures

hundred years ago was such a good learning environment is that
the teacher with 70 kids from ages 6 to 16 had to use the older
children to tutor and mentor the younger ones. And the older
children learned. And we know that this is part of the specs
for the school of tomorrow: How do we put the more advanced
youngsters to work teaching so that they not only learn but also
discover learning and the joy of learning?
Finally, we know that we can do these things. And this is
where technology comes in. Technology makes it possible for the
individual student to work individually, and work at his or her
own speed and rhythm and attention span. Rhythm is especially
important because if you violate it, you create fatigue. And so
modern technology enables especially young children to work
how they learn best, so that they can achieve.
Technology can also greatly extend a teacher’s span, the time
a teacher has to spend with individuals. That’s because the cus-
todial job, which takes so much time, even in high school, can be
taken over by technology. With technology, a student manages
himself or herself very largely. Yes, you have to supervise them,
but to a large extent the oldest children do that, if you use them
as teachers, just as I supervised many years ago that Latin school
friend of mine in doing his algebra.
We know that the new school is not going to be cheap—and
it shouldn’t be. A good school never has been. It is, after all,
the real capital investment of a modern economy. But it’ll prob-
ably be cheaper than the traditional school. The technology is no
longer very expensive, and it’s getting cheaper by the day.
But the main, the central, the profound shift is that the school
of the future is one in which the focus is on learning. That’s al-
ways been the end product of the school. But the focus of the
traditional school is teaching. We have no “learning colleges”;
we have teachers’ colleges. We don’t really talk of good learners;
we talk of good teachers. We need teachers’ colleges and we need