Tomorrow's business world	471

Many breakthroughs have emerged only in the last three years. Significantly, nearly all have been developed in the business world, not in the world of "education". Many of the greatest successes have been produced by school dropouts or very young graduates. Since the early 1990s the merger between Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the Microsoft base in Washington state, has blossomed. Key aspects of the new revolution will come from the further blending of talents from the movie, computer, music and electronic games industries, linking those abilities to good educational practice. But so far traditional school systems have been left far behind in the race.
   Says Bill Gates: "The average primary or secondary school in the United States lags considerably behind the average American business in the availability of new information technology. Preschoolers familiar with cellular telephones, pagers and personal computers enter kindergarten where chalkboards and overhead projectors represent the state of the art."7
   Equally important, the structure of most school systems is not designed to multiply brilliant teacher talent. Great teachers are skilled in a variety of abilities: subject knowledge, empathy, communications, warmth, interactivity, music, art, graphics and some aspects of multimedia presentations.
   In school those talents will be confined to 20 to 40 students at a time, when today they could be instantly available to the world.
   Seldom do teachers get the opportunity to link their most outstanding talents with the diverse skills of others. To make even a good videotape, for instance, requires a wide blend of talent: producer, director, scriptwriter, camera-sound crew, video editor, music composer, musicians, sound mixer, graphic designer and many more. What chance has "education" got to compete unless it can reorganize to blend the same kind of multifaceted talents, store the results digitally, and then "repackage" them in any interactive form required as the new multimedia platforms converge?