It shows people getting around on motorized skates. Not everyone is getting around - and one poor fellow has fallen! - but it is apparently widely available and used for pleasure and for purpose. This picture is from 1910, and is purported to show the year 2000. (There are more pictures here. I suggest checking it out.) Of course, the year is now 2015, and while motorized roller skates exist, they are not the big hip thing. We can deduce quite easily this prediction is wrong.
But what is more interesting is to look at what the artist did not think was changing. The clothing reflects 1910 fashion. The roads have no cars, and also no marked parking spaces and parking meters. The streetlights seem to still be gas, and are not particularly high (as ours are). Interesting, 1910 is the year electric lights became more affordable and more practical. They didn't need to predict something in the year 2000. Had these pictures been painted in 1915, the street lights may have looked different.
Usefully predicting the future is really, really hard. It's fun to imagine motorized roller skates, but more important to imagine the effects of motorized roller skates. This means anything with wheels can be motorized. And, for the most part, anything can be given wheels. And since we're imaging, let's think of a miniature control system. Surely that will be invented at some point. So, automated wheels that can navigate safely. What can we conclude from there.
This quickly makes mining significantly safer, and it automates some of the labor, eliminating many jobs. Because it is safer and requires less employees, this makes mined resources much less expensive, making many things previously unavailable to the general public suddenly abundant. Now you can mine Zinc in such quantities as to make it very cheap. And, indeed, in several decades, the zinc and copper composition of the penny essentially switched, from 95% copper and 5% zinc to the current 5% copper and 97.5% zinc.
This seems like terrible news for copper miners. Their workload is getting less and less (and also more automated). We need to stop the machines. Call in the luddites! But we could also broaden our scopes. What else could copper miners do? They could mine something else. They could learn to repair or optimize the machines. They could join the booming electric light business. There are a lot of options. We can't restrict ourselves to what we know. 2000 was way, way cooler than motorized roller skates. (As a bonus, almost all of the new jobs would be much, much safer than mining.)
So what does this mean for education? Here's a typical "future of education" picture. Every child has a tablet, and the teacher has what looks like to be an enormous smart board behind him. Presumably this is all touch-enabled with fast wireless internet.
But there are a number of assumptions here that reflect the old way of thinking, and indeed a major "gas light." That is, contemporary traditions that are already in the process of being replaced. First, all the students are sitting at desks, and they are all facing the teacher. The teacher is standing at the front with, for all intents and purposes, is an electronic black board. The students and the learners are in one room. There is a window showing it is daylight: We can assume they go to school during the day, Monday through Friday, as students go to school now.
If we can have electronic black boards, that information can be displayed on the students screen directly. We already have screen sharing programs that allow this. Especially for such a large screen, there's a lot to take in. Why not let students peruse it on their own device? Why not have different parts be links. Let's pretend this is a class about bridges. The students have been tasked with physically building a bridge out of materials. Students could click on different parts of the bridge and learn more about them. How does it work? What is it called? What's the best way to make it? That saves the teacher time in the classroom (though it calls for a lot of prep work), and it gives the students a lot of agency.
OK, so what about the desks? If the students have tablets, why do they need desks and straight-backed chairs. They should be given a variety of sitting methods, or even allow for standing. There's no educational reason the students should be seated in such a way. Not to sound too Silicon Valley, but toss out those tables and chairs and bring in bean bags and standing desks (Well, and keep some of the chairs and tables - there are some students who genuinely prefer those).
Time of day. Why? To go extreme, why have classrooms at all? If the electronic blackboard can be viewed on students' tablets, and if the teacher has already created links and videos, etc, why do all the students need to be present at the same time? Add an "email me" button or say "From 2-4 PM I will be available by video phone, click here to call." and the teacher is still available. The students will make their bridge at home, or in the library, or wherever is most convenient for them. Then they'll bring their project in to the teacher (Who needs to physically have it to evaluate it. There are other kinds of projects where a photo or video would suffice), who will evaluate it, and then make a video or take a picture of each project and post it so all the students can see the work of their peers, and maybe give feedback on it. All on their tablet at whatever time works best for them.
If it seems novel to not have a "school day," consider the popularity of online colleges and telecommuting. Even if many online colleges have significant credibility issues, that doesn't mean online degrees will be worthless forever, or that the idea itself is not credible. Many schools with campuses have online programs that greatly reduce (though not always eliminate) the time a student needs to be at the campus. This frees them up to work and take care of their families and other needs that may have stood in the way of their education. There's no particular reason to not extend this model, once it starts to work better and the frauds have been deterred, to high school and middle school. Imagine how much more successful our students could be if they could work at their own pace and had all the information they needed at their fingertips. Sure, some may abuse the system, and it may take a while to be normalized, but that's the price of progress.
Socrates, in Plato's Phaedrus, denounces writing. He says, "[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learner's soul, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters..." Of course, it took a long time for writing (and, more importantly, reading) to go from being a scholarly/priestly tradition to a skill within the reach of a common citizen, but it happened, and while Socrates may be right that our memories suffered because of it, it did not create "forgetfulness in the learner's soul." It did not damage the human race. Growing pains aside, it has done a great deal of wonder for us all. Much more than those who first wrote on papyrus could ever have imagined.
We have a great future in front of us. Let's imagine something wonderful.
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