Thursday 26 September 2002

Pic of the day: Tertiary edutainment. Strip no 3. Woot! But I think I shall have to move this thing out of here if I am to keep it up. Today, however, it is strangely on topic ...

Quiet revolutions

There's a quiet revolution going on
like a fire in every corner of the world,
and friends that you have known for many years
are talking with a new light inside,
talking with a brightness in their eyes.

Chris de Burgh: Quiet Revolution, from the CD with the same name.

I could not help thinking of this song when I read today's issue of The Economist. (A magazine that I recently renewed my online subscription to for another year, and with little regret.) There was this article about higher education, and how the world has seen an explosion in college and university attendance. Not just the western world, but much of the developing world, even the Middle East. The article made a point of the fact that governments (with the exception of Scandinavia) had generally caved in and let the students pay more and more of the tuition themselves. (Most likely their parents, actually.) This had not done much to stop the students, who just kept coming, squeezing into a system that simply did not have the capacity to handle such a surge.

Well, it's about time. Firstly, there is a brisk demand for highly educated workers, while the need for unskilled labor drops like a shot duck towards zero. Secondly, there's the Flynn Effect, a still not quite explained but measurable rise in intelligence. Flynn believes that it is a question of the environment rewarding intelligence. If so, the environment sure starts early, because it starts already fairly early in childhood. I am not sure if there is any point at all where you can already test IQ and the effect is not there.

Oh, and the article was called The quiet educational revolution. The words "quiet revolution" also appeared verbatim in the text of the article:
THIS month marks, as it does every year, a reopening of universities and colleges around the world. But it will also be another step in a quiet revolution which is transforming societies around the world. Enrolments in higher education have surged in the past two decades, and the trend, if anything, is accelerating rather than slowing down.

We may be approaching a phase change. But do we have time? Or will we reach another singularity before that ... one that devours our little planet forever? I don't know. The future is on the table and the dice are rolling. We are playing dice with God, and everybody may lose. We seriously need a new generation of scientists who can see further than the bunch who are now trying to make black holes out of curiosity. If only there is time.

There are quiet conversations going on
as people speak about what they have seen.
And everywhere the feeling's getting stronger
that soon there will be change in our lives.
From a thousand years of looking in the skies:
Something is coming now...
something is coming now.