I had this interesting debate with my wife on what the future of education might look like as we navigate forth in this information age. We’ve seen the internet democratize many traditionally monolithic institutions. Radio programs of the yore are now podcasts that anyone can create. You no longer need to be a part of the TV industry to create a widely consumed audio-visual show. People can now self-publish without the backing of a publication house, and in many parts of the world, you can create your own news network over youtube (a practice that I personally find alarming).
The direct extrapolation seems to be that anything that is organized will soon become democratized due to the Internet. So what about education? I think this is one of those instances where the answer to the future may lie in its past. In ancient India, for example, there used to be a proto-university-like structure called the Gurukul (lit. house of the Guru), run by a learned person, or the Guru. A person who wanted to learn the Guru’s teachings, i.e. the shishya, would reside and obtain his teachings, and when he’d learned enough to the Guru’s satisfaction, he’d earn his endorsement and be able to go out in the world to put his learnings to practice. This is quite similar to apprenticeship, where an apprentice seeks a master and learns under his guidance. The focus of both of these systems is on the fact that all power resides in the direct stakeholders. The educators can decide who to accept and who to endorse, while the students can choose who to study under. Of course, in recent times, we as a society have more or less converged to a system where we establish institutions that provide pupils a congregation of learned men to study under, partly due to the fact that modern education is orders of magnitude more complex than what any one single person can possibly impart. But the modality has remained the same. Once the modern student gets the endorsement of this institution, he is, much like in the past, ready to go out in the world and practice his craft.
Is it too far-fetched to consider that society may displace these institutions, i.e. the universities, in favor of a more democratized learning experience, not unlike the Gurukul? Imagine a future where learned men run their own classes, completely decoupled from the university. A student would then be able to enroll in a combination of these independent classes with the instructors that they want to study under. This setting puts the power into the hands of people, i.e., the educators, instead of any institution. The educators would be the direct recipients of any remuneration, would be able to hire staff of their own choosing, and would have tremendous independence in how they want to structure their curriculum. The students, on the other hand, might benefit from significantly lower education costs, and an educational experience that is completely to their liking. Of course, switching to this model may not be trivial. One can imagine that theoretical fields like language, philosophy, mathematics, theoretical physics etc. would have it far easier in this model than practice-oriented fields like medicine. Then there is the question of whether employers would even hire people who’ve been trained in such way? I don’t see any reason as to why not. After all, if a person were to come to me with an endorsement letter by Terence Tao stating that the bearer knows Algebraic Combinatorics to an acceptable degree, I would have no reason to suspect that he does not.
Finally, any prediction about the future is inherently uncertain. People do, after all, go to universities not just for the learning but also for the social experience, and it is highly unlikely that universities would be displaced any time soon. But, with the rising tuition costs, people are finding it less and less worth their money to pay for certain branches of education. Perhaps, these branches could be democratized first? That way, people could still learn about it and not pay exorbitant fees to an institution that has become unreasonably bloated in recent times.