And if we build business plans without counting in the need for education, we're back to counting chauffeurs. Personally, I'd welcome a call for the creation of an entirely new approach to education. I'd happily forfeit every institutional assumption we've made, ranging from the hours we keep to the furniture we use to the months we teach, from the idea of classrooms to the notion of schools themselves. The model for what we have was created more than a century ago, in England, with the factory where the children worked as the prototype for the schools they were forced to attend. Putting computers into such models is comparable to installing PC's on stagecoaches.
Schools are merely an illustration.
We could just as well consider issues of healthcare, with our inability in a stunningly healthy economy to raise equally healthy children. We could consider crime, or drugs, or the rapidly expanding population of elderly who are growing not only older, but also poorer, because they never imagined, and therefore never prepared for, so many years beyond retirement. We could ask how we will build a core city without a core transportation system, how we will sustain a downtown revitalization without providing access to it, how we will employ those with least economic potential in a community when they cannot move to and from employment. The Bank of America, one of the nation's premier economic institutions, recently issued a report in which they observed that our markets and our communities are the same. They said that our economy cannot be healthier than the communities which sustain it, and that our communities are growing increasingly fractured and fractious.