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 Education is already grabbing a major chunk of America’s gross national product. I believe that the U.S. now spends around $1 trillion on education and training. This number will increase rapidly, but the growth won’t be in traditional schools, which currently take about 10% of the GNP (kindergarten through high school, 6%; colleges and universities, 4%). The growth will be in continuing adult education. Online delivery is the trigger for this growth, but the demand for lifetime education stems from profound changes in society. In simplest terms, people who are already highly educated and high achievers increasingly sense that they are not keeping up. They’ve come back to school because they want and need new ways of looking at things outside of their competencies. They want to learn to see things whole. Many of them are there to reflect on their experiences, to see them in a broader perspective. They need this perspective to cope with today’s bewildering technological and economic changes.The market for continuing education is already much bigger than most people realize. A good guess is that it already accounts for 6% of GNP in the U.S. and is rapidly getting there in other developed countries. It is going to get a lot higher.
Why this explosion of demand? We live in an economy where knowledge, not buildings and machinery, is the chief resource and where knowledge-workers make up the biggest part of the work force. Until well into the 20th century, most workers were manual workers. Today in the U.S., only about 20% do manual work. Of the remainder, nearly half, 40% of our total work force, are knowledge-workers. Again, the proportions are roughly similar for other developed countries. Workers have always had to gain skills, but knowledge is different from skill. Skills change very slowly. My Dutch ancestors- drucker means "printer" in Dutch- ran a print shop in Amsterdam from 1517 until around 1730. In all those centuries none of them had to learn a new skill. It was the same in most industries. In dress-making there hasn’t been a new skill required since a Hungarian invented the buttonhole in the 11th century.
For most of human history a skilled worker had learned what he needed to learn by the time his apprenticeship was finished at 18 or 19. Not so with the modern knowledge-worker. Physicians, medical technicians in the pathology lab, computer-repair people, lawyers and human resource managers can scarcely keep up with developments in their fields. This is why so many professional associations put continuing education among their highest priorities.
Keeping up with knowledge and seeing the world whole mattered less in the days of lifetime employment. When young people took a job at Metropolitan Life or the telephone company or General Motors or Royal Dutch / Shell or Mitsubishi, they often expected to remain there until retirement.
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