“School’s OUT” - revisited

In fact, school as we know it is dead or quickly dying. American education - at an annual cost of $400 billion - has become a solid-gold life jacket: The longer we cling to it, the deeper it will sink us.

In his revolutionary book “School’s OUT,” Lewis J. Perelman shows [already in 1992] that instead of education, what we need is genuine learning: more, better, faster, cheaper.

In fact, there is a learning revolution taking place right before our eyes - and largely outside of school classrooms. A new wave of knowledge technology has put the access to enhanced learning at our fingertips. This “hyperlearning” HL technology can enable anyone to learn anything, anywhere, anytime, with grade-A results. And HL technology is getting rapidly cheaper and more powerful, while classroom teaching gets more steadily more expensive and unproductive.

The radical precept at the heart of “School’s OUT” is that hyperlearning does not represent an avenue for educational reform but a total replacement for conventional education, an essential new industry for any nation hoping to prosper in the next millennium; it is also “the greatest business opportunity since Rockefeller found oil.”

Among other items on the hyperlearning manifesto:

• Abolish the credential system that chokes progress and clouds our educational agenda.
• Push for the complete commercial privatization of the public education empire, probably the largest and last huge socialist economy on earth.
• Implement for learning at all ages the huge breakthroughs that have already been developed in the military and commercial sectors.
• Build the information superhighway network that can deliver hyperlearning to everyone.

An extraordinary synthesis of economic analysis and technological expertise, “School’s OUT” is the radical departure that will alter our thinking about learning forever; it depicts a future reality that is fast approaching and will overtake us ...

From “School’s OUT”
William Morrow & Company, Inc. N.Y., N.Y.
ISBN 0-688-11286-2