Promoting Education in the 21st Century

20 years ago. The teachers were these respected people, passing knowledge with pride and self-sufficiency. They were the center of the educational world, and we, the students, were just some random people who got there to educate ourselves, looking up to those professors. Now, at the second decade of the 21^st century, things have turned upside down for the field of education. Nothing is the same.

My high school professors used to be very relaxed, some arrogant and rude, and others friendly and convincing; yet they all had several things in common - they were the main source of my education. I didn’t have computer support, internet to teach me everything, Google to help me find out about everything and anything. All I wanted to know, and all I had to know, came out from a single source - my professors.

Where, when and why did all this change?

With the computer development, the era of teaching is coming to its end, and I am afraid that by the end of the century, the term “professor” will be an archaic word used to describe something, or someone that used to teach, but not anymore.

Personal computers are changing the world. We are in a much bigger need of self-education right now. The classes in every teaching institution got new helpers, which came dressed as artificial intelligence, in the form of computers, or numerous hand-held devices. There is no modern class without the use of computer, and other teaching aids, in the way of video beam, slide show projectors, 3d effects, etc. The teacher becomes more or less just the person who clicks the button, and changes the slides. All those years of hard studying have led to this, their dreams came true, and they became button-clickers, slide-changers? To make things even worse, students don’t see their professors as the center of their education anymore, their respect is hanging on a thread while an important supplement to every educational cycle is the internet, full of information which can help you study; write articles, seminar papers, pretty much everything you need. This puts every professor in a difficult situation, where they literally have to be afraid of their “necessity” in the educational field. Every day, they are becoming more and more obsolete. Does this mean that they might go “extinct”? The professors of today will, and might get replaced by the computer technologies, which will teach us everything with a simple click. This is impending doom which has its good sides, but also has a major problem in the field of education, and that is called passing on the experience, and the ability to think, improvise, and indulge. This is something that computers will never be able to do, and it is one of the major problems that we are facing with.

The world of today has become a ridiculous place, filled with innovations, changes that we, humans, are accepting a bit harder than expected. We are born to adopt, but this evolution is going too fast, maybe too fast for us. I’m not sure what will happen, and where this will take us, but I’m sure in one thing - it is already way beyond our control at this point.