Chapter 2 - Why not the best?

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Why not the best?	91

  A full learning revolution will thus involve much more than schooling. Fortunately, most of the learning breakthroughs have already been made. Many of them have come from able teachers. Many from business. Many from sports psychology and coaching techniques. Many from research into the human brain. Some from studies in nutrition. Others from health programs. And many from linking communities, schools and businesses together to replan the way ahead.
  To achieve the world's best educational system, we believe, requires action in 13 separate but interrelated areas.

1. The new role of electronic communications

   We live in the first era of human history where it is possible for everyone to communicate with everyone else.
  It is also the first era where children know more about the dominant technology than teachers or adults.
  This combined Internet, computer and world-wide-web revolution is reshaping an entire generation: even more than the printing press, radio, the automobile and television have reshaped previous ones.
  And, as Don Tapscott puts it so aptly: "What we know for certain is that children without access to the new media will be developmentally disadvantaged."
  If left only to market forces, he says, the new digital economy "could foster a two-tiered society, creating a major gulf between information haves and have-nots - those who can communicate with the world and those who can't." He talks of a growing "information apartheid", where "the have-nots become the know-nots and the do-nots". And Tapscott challenges almost every form of hierarchy when he claims: "The people, companies, and nations which succeed in the new economy will be those who listen to their children."3
  Tapscott, in one of his several excellent books on the subject, calls for all 21st century societies to "give children the tools they need and they will be the single most important source of guidance on how to make the schools relevant and effective."4 By using those tools, "the students teach themselves. While they're at it they can probably teach their teachers as well" - as Finland is proving in practice.
   Amazingly, no country has yet completed a national program to link all its citizens into an interactive electronics instant communications

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