| Topic: |
Sociology > Education |
| User: |
"alt.education.distance" |
| Date: |
17 Dec 2006 06:18:27 PM |
| Object: |
Solution Path Minimization - Part 1 - Skill Obsolescence |
Solution Path Minimization - Part 1 - Skill Obsolescence
For a very long time, and for good practical reasons, we have urged
people to get an education. The educated have skills that can be used in
gainful employments. This long standing advice has seemed so obvious
that we have not felt much need to analyze the structural details of
education as it is applied to real problems (the education payoff). I
expect we could well regard the nature of man from his earliest
tool-making (stone-age) days as being able to habituate behaviors
(skills) that increased his welfare over those without such behaviors.
More recently students attend classes and work to remember concepts and
how they may be applied. Students take tests and upon receiving a
passing grade are regarded as educated.
Not too long ago the rate of skill obsolescence was fairly low with
substantially the same skills being carried from generation to
generation. Today, particularly in the fast evolving technology areas
such as software, skill obsolescence can occur within a few years. If it
takes a few years to become educated and by the time you are educated or
very shortly afterwards your education has become obsolete, what was the
utility of having been educated? The common response to such an
observation is that a modern person needs to pursue a continual
education process to avoid skill obsolescence. However, it is rather
immediate that such a program, however unavoidable, will increase the
total portion of work related time and expense in obtaining and paying
for additional education.
Let us adopt the following perspective: Education is the process of
habituating (learning) identified solution paths for given problem
contexts. A solution path has three components: (1) the initial
conditions, (2) a solution path (function) we can effect from initial to
final conditions and (3) the final conditions. Or from a slightly
different perspective we have a given state (initial conditions), a goal
(final conditions), and are looking for a solution (function) with which
we can obtain the goal (problem resolution).
Another aspect of education is that it is a kind of capital, an
investment, a set of tools we expect to be able to use a sufficient
number of times where the return on those several uses will justify our
initial outlay. We buy a set of tools thinking we will be able to use
those tools over and over again in the future where their use provides
us a present-value return exceeding the cost of the tools. The risk
(return) factors are: (1) the cost of the tools: (1a) expense and (1b)
time, (2) the rates of change of the three solution context components:
(2a) the kinds of initial conditions in which the tools can be applied,
(2b) the cost and relative efficiency of competing tools now and over
the life expectancy of the tools, and (2c) the kinds of goals (their
solution paths) to which the tools can be applied. We will need to keep
the total risk sufficiently low in order to have a minimal expectation
that the education tools investment will have a sufficient return.
A high rate of skill obsolescence means high rates of change in the
solution component areas (2) that then requires the remaining tool risk
factors (1) to fall in order to maintain the same return, or the return
will fall toward a condition where the marginal benefit of the tools
goes to zero, at which point we do not gain by being educated. If our
modern education investment only lasts half as long as previously then
the outlays for education (1) must be reduced by the present value of
the removed last half of the tools' use.
Methods to obtain lower education expense at a fraction of what is
currently applied are commonly known and in large part derive from the
observation that distribution of the information that is the major
portion of the education function can be easily provided on the Internet
at a trivial expense. There are obviously many viewpoints as to what
role the Internet can play in education and we could spend considerable
time debating the many issues. But for this discussion that debate has
subsided and we are now working to optimize the new Internet education
environment.
As education expense reduces to an irrelevance through the use of the
Internet we would expect to find the rate of skill obsolesence
increasing significantly because of the greater ease by which education
can be obtained. A lower education efficiency holds back the rate of
skill obsolescence because of the time and effort required to bring
competing skills (technologies) on-line. Wide-spread education access
and a time-to-skill reduction enable a rise in skill competition and a
faster evolution in the kinds of skills required (skill evolution
enables goal context evolution). These cause a higher rate of skill
obsolescence. We may have gained significantly in one education risk
component, education expense (1a), but have lost in all the others
except possibly for education time (1b), the only remaining direct
outlay for the individual. Education time may increase or decrease
depending on how the new education process is arranged. Clearly the
number of skills (in the sense of an expected larger variety of problems
requiring solutions) that need to be applied over a unit time have
increased as defined by the higher rate of skill obsolescence, but if we
can learn and utilize skills in a smaller portion of total time under
the new conditions as against the portion of available time before the
new education efficiency, we will gain in this factor also. In any case,
the critical issue for the individual in the new context is the rate at
which problems can be solved given an apparent requirement for a higher
frequency of skill acquisition. We are required to solve problems with
less total education preparation time for each problem. The limit
condition for this trend is that we are required to solve problems while
learning as little as possible.
This is not a new limit condition and is rather the standard limit
condition applied to all production factors: maximize output while
minimizing input. The difference is perhaps a realization that the
education or solution time function will need to become very time
efficient (1b) on a per-problem basis in order to counterbalance a high
obsolesence rate brought about by a very low education expense (1a).
Another way to look at this is that increased competition and problem
context evolution brought about by (1a) will put pressure on the only
other input factor available to the individual at (1b), total solution
time. The production factor that is skill from education begins to look
more like raw material consumed during production as against long-term
capital equipment, with the latter being the long standing viewpoint.
Next: Solution Path Minimization - Part 2 - The Real Problems Context
.
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