He's right: Technology has changed everything
It’s not easy to recognize when someone with whom you frequently disagree might be on to something.
The Press editor and Brent Regan, Kootenai County Republican Central Committee chairman and financial force behind the Libertarian-infused Idaho Freedom Foundation, don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues. However, Regan penned a thought-provoking, three-part series on education that The Press published Tuesday through Thursday. Every Idahoan would benefit by reading it. If you missed it, here are links:
Summarizing roughly 1,800 words, Regan’s point is that technology has enabled the dissemination and absorption of information in ways nobody imagined just a few years ago. Yet American education is rooted largely in a delivery system hundreds of years old. Not only that, but the way most people learn has changed.
His conclusion: Public education dollars should at least in part be loosed to follow the students. While he’s not calling for an outright overthrow of the public ed institution, he is making a salient case for holding up old processes and procedures under the bright lights of innovation and free-market ideas, seeing the flaws and making them better.
Whether or not you agree with him on his views of public education, Regan is serving up a general recipe that makes sense. It’s worth each of us considering.
What are we doing today, and how are we thinking, merely because that’s the way we’ve always done it or seen it? When is it time to quit with the tweaks and start over?
Change can be hard to embrace, but those who aren’t open to opportunities to do things better are going to be displaced, targeted for storage or disposal.
And if they’re not up to the challenge, they shouldn’t complain when they find themselves left far behind.