It’s hard to find the actual quote that attributes to Bill gates the growing irrelevance of place-based education, but Eric Stoller posts the pertinent clip (and his objections to it) at
http://ericstoller.com/blog/2010/08/07/disagreeing-with-bill-gates/
I agree with Eric and add the following.
Bill Gates doesn’t seem to actually care what happens to children and young adults in the education process – in his worldview, all roads lead to technology. The actual development of a human being is completely absent from his concept of education. To him, it would seem, education is the delivery of information and “partly baby-sitting so the parents can do other things.”
As higher education becomes more web-based because the economics of a physical community of learning make it prohibitively expensive for mere mortals, when do children leave home? When and how do they enter the “real world?” For many, the college experience is a bridge between a sheltered home life and taking complete responsibility for oneself. Not everyone goes to school to party, Mr. Gates. Not every learner is self-motivated that will thrive online.
In Gates’ description, there’s no discussion of actual learning, understanding, growing character, or learning to interact with other people face to face. Isn’t it ironic that with the population of the world at it’s highest ever – and growing – his solutions are all virtual? Isn’t there something odd in this? We have more and more people and we treat them more and more like machines. I was told recently that education is adopting “the factory model.” Now human beings are the interchangeable parts. One breaks, throw it away and get another cheap one to replace it. I’d call this the dehumanization revolution, and technology is the great enabler.
Carol Baroudi's Blog 