TEXT E As citizens of advanced
but vulnerable economies, we must either relentlessly increase the quality of
our skills or see our standard of living erode. For the future, competition
between nations will be increasingly based on technological skill. Oil and
natural resources will still be important, but they no longer will determine a
nation’s economic strength. This will now be a matter of the way people organize
themselves and the nature and quality of their work. Japan and the "new Japans"
of East Asia are demonstrating this point in ways that are becoming painfully
obvious to the older industrial countries. There is simply no
way to rest on our past achievements. Today’s competition renders obsolete huge
chunks of what we know and what forces us to innovate. For each individual,
several careers will be customary, and continuing education and retraining will
be inescapable. To attain this extraordinary level of education, government,
business, schools, and even individuals will turn to technology for the
answer. In industry, processing the information and designing
the changes necessary to keep up with the market has meant the growing use of
computers. The schools are now following close behind. Already some colleges in
the United States are requiring a computer for each student. It is estimated
that 500,000 computers are already in use in American high schools and
elementary schools. Although there is an abysmal lack of educational software,
the number of computers in schools expands rapidly. The computer
is the Proteus of machines, as it takes on a thousand forms and serves a
thousand functions. But its truly revolutionary character can be seen in its
interactive potential. With advanced computers, learning can be individualized
and serf-paced. Teachers can become more productive and the entire learning
environment enriched. It is striking how much current teaching
is a product of pencil and paper technology. With the computer’s capacity for
simulation and diverse kinds of feedback, all sorts of new possibilities open up
for the redesign of curriculums. Seymour Papert, the inventor of the computer
language LOGO, believes that concepts in physics and advanced mathematics can be
taught in the early grades with the use of computers. On every-day level,
word-processing significantly improves the capacity for written expression. In
terms of drill and practice, self-paced computer-assisted instruction enables
the student to advance rapidly-without being limited by the conflicting needs of
the entire class. In short, once we learn to use this new brain outside the
brain, education will never be the same. Industry, faced with
the pressures of a rapidly shifting market, is already designing new methods to
retrain its workers. In the United States, a technological university has been
set up to teach engineering courses by satellite. And the advances in
telecommunications and computational power will dramatically expand the
opportunities for national and international efforts in education and
training. Without romanticizing the machine, it is clear that
computers uniquely change the potential for equipping today’s citizens for
unprecedented tasks of the future. Particularly in Europe and the United Sates,
innovation will be the basis for continued prosperity. New competitors are
emerging to challenge the old economic arrangements. How successfully we respond
will depend on how much we invest in people and how wisely we employ the
learning tools of the new technology. The word "Proteus" is closest in meaning to ______.