why have the past 50 years of technological change had so little impact on schooling?
The English word “lecture” derives from Medieval Latin’s “lectura” and is cognate with words like “lecteur” (French) and “lector” (Spanish) which mean “reader.” A lecturer, in other words, is a reader.
Today, giving a lecture that consisted of simply standing at a podium reading a book would be considered bad practice. But several hundred years ago, books were extremely expensive because hand-copying manuscripts doesn’t scale. What does scale, at least to an extent, is the human voice. So an institution could serve the very useful function of providing a place where students could gather to hear a person read out loud from a book and write down what the lecturer was saying, securing knowledge.
An institution like that would need to have a lot of books on hand and a scholar would need ready access to books, so producing scholarship was highly complementary to lecturing. The scholars take books as inputs but also produce books as outputs. To earn money, they would lecture — which is to say, read the books — to students. The students themselves would benefit not only from learning about what the books say but also from some kind of formal certification. And thus was born the familiar university bundle that combines libraries, scholarship, teaching, and certification.
This is a somewhat rickety pile of in-principle-separate ideas that really does seem vulnerable to technological disruption. On its face, the relevant disruptive technology should have been the printing press, and the disruption should have happened three or four hundred years ago. But not only did the basic structure of the university persist, but most of the world’s leading universities are also much newer than the printing press. Harvard and Yale are really old by the standards of American institutions, but they’re not older than printing — and many other prestigious American universities date from the second half of the nineteenth century. By the time Stanford and the University of Texas were founded, it was already extremely clear that people could study books at home (or in libraries) and then take exams administered by certifying bodies that had nothing to do with teaching or research.