If Gonski is the answer what is the question?

In a previous article, Is the USA in 'irreversible decline'?, I pointed to the enormous rise in manufacturing productivity in the US. In the thirty year period 1980 – 2010 output per employee has risen threefold. It is not manufacturing but manufacturing employment that is in decline in the US.

Of course the rise in manufacturing productivity is not unique to the US. It has been a global phenomenon. All over the world we are producing more and more goods with fewer and fewer people.

Nor is the rise in productivity confined to manufacturing. At the beginning of the twentieth century around one third of the labour force in what are today called "Western" countries was employed on the farm. Today minuscule labour forces produce more food than ever.

The rise in labour productivity has not been confined to manufacturing and agriculture. It has affected almost every aspect of economic activity. This from the NY Times of 4 March 2011.

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of "discovery" - providing documents relevant to a lawsuit - the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

Multimedia

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, "e-discovery" software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

How do automated systems of document discovery compare to their human counterparts?

By all accounts automated systems perform better than humans. This is hardly surprising. As any lawyer will tell you, document inspection is insanely boring. It is easy for a human lawyer to miss something important. By some estimates in large cases human lawyers are only right about 60% of the time. That's barely better than a coin toss.

In economic terms what we have seen globally over many centuries is the substitution of capital for labour. The deployment of capital in the form of machines and software enables one man to do the work of many more cheaply and, usually, better. A man with a horse drawn cart with steel-rimmed wheels can shift more cargo more rapidly than a human being can carry on his back. Give the man a diesel truck and decent roads and he can shift even more.

And a small team armed with the right software can do the work of armies of lawyers and do it better and more cheaply.

I think you can all see where this is leading. So let's get back to Gonski.

I suggest that the current model for education belongs to the horse and cart era. Or, if you like, the era of hundreds of lawyers laboriously over thousands of documents. Just as we can substitute capital for labour in every other human enterprise, so I suggest, we can do it in education.

Before people get too angry at these suggestions I want to be explicit about what I'm not saying.