In their 2008 book, The Race Between Education and Technology, Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Laurence Katz argue that technological advancement was a major spur to educational attainment for the U.S., at least until the 1970s, and that this symbiotic relationship laid the grounds for almost a century of American prosperity and relative economic equality. As the U.S. had a more open educational system in place by the end of the 19th century, it was able to educate its citizens to the secondary level earlier and in greater numbers than anywhere else in the world.
"Because the American people were the most educated in the world, they were in the best position to invent, be entrepreneurial, and produce goods and services using advanced technologies," they write (nodding, of course, to other preconditions such as secure property rights and a form of government sympathetic to free markets).
Many interesting observations follow on from this central thesis, notably that the ability of the educational system to supply workers educated to meet the needs of the economy, and yet keep pushing it forward, increased economic equality. But when educational attainment began to stagnate in the 1970s, the trend was reversed and then compounded by accelerating technological innovation.
The Race Between Education and Technology is a hefty read filled with data and charts and sometimes long passages written, regrettably, in economese, which likely have been and remain rich fodder for argument among economists. But the general brilliance of illumination makes this book a feast of provocation. In particular, I was struck by what could be called the mediocrity dilemma, which is that middling achievement in education is at the most risk from advancing technological change, as average skills can either be replaced by a program or offshored at lower cost, while the demand for people with no skills or high skills will remain robust. (Something, according to Goldin and Katz, that accounts for the negligible impact of immigration on economic inequality.)
But the idea of a race between education and technology is also an interesting way of exploring the travails and the future of the media. For years, journalism education in the U.S. aspired towards the empirical certainties of social science, and it did so because the expansion of university education demanded that nontraditional subjects genuflect to the power of scientific enquiry. To be worthy of a place in the university pantheon, English literature, for example, demanded its students become philologists; to be persuasive, journalism would take law or medicine as its educational models. As Joseph Pulitzer argued in The College of Journalism, "I wish to begin a movement that will raise journalism to the rank of a learned profession."
If that didn’t quite pan out, journalism was institutionalized and codified into a series of operations (beats), formulas ("the inverted pyramid," the anecdotal lede, avoiding adverbs) and a selection of ideological catchphrases that embodied a strong sense of ethical purpose if not necessarily ethical understanding (a journalist was "a lookout on the ship of state," he or she was to "be skeptical," "hold truth to power" and "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted"). All of these codes made journalism teachable and gave it the aura of a profession.
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