In their 1997 book The 500 Year Delta, Jim Taylor and Watts Wagner described our current state of Millennial transition as "the triple witching hour" -- when the Age of Reason gives way to the Age of Chaos and all our most dearly held assumptions no longer hold up.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our western system of education. The rapid changes that have occurred since the introduction of universal education have left it as obsolete as the T-Rex -- the difference being that even the T-Rex never claimed as many victims in a year. When universal education was introduced, the vision of an educated, literate population led the way. The emphasis on the "Three Rs" (writing, reading and 'rithmatic) was sufficient to ensure the ability to continue learning through life. The basic illiteracy of this formula worried no one. The Three Rs was a handy tag on which to hang the dream of making education easily accessible to even the poorest and easily retained.

Like the dinosaurs, it grew ever larger, encompassing things never originally intended and only coming about because school freed parents to do other things beside mind their kids -- so other studies, less academic and work-driven, were introduced.

In simpler times, the path was clearly defined: go to school, get an education, get a job. But our education system, like so many others, has fallen victim to complexity and chaos; too rigid, too structured, it fails even in its most basic mission--to provide students with adequate literacy skills.

Here in Australia, students learn from teachers who themselves have difficulty spelling correctly. Kids are dropping out of school without basic literacy, and in keeping with the chaos of the times, are increasingly making up for nine or ten wasted years at school by a variety of individual approaches.

Lucy, 17, is a bright, attractive girl. She dropped out of school three years ago. Bored and frustrated, she complained she was learning nothing relevant there. But one thing remained relevant. To have a life, Lucy has to have that magic bit of paper called the Higher School Certificate.

Instead of going back to school, Lucy has enrolled herself at a technical college, cramming four years of study into two and passing every test. She attends college five half-days a week, and still gets twice as many results as she did in High School. Her learning is focussed on what she needs to know and as she says herself -- "the teachers treat you like a human being." At 14, Chris got kicked out of High School when the teachers despaired of him. He refused to co-operate, and it was believed he could never learn to read. He simply refused to open a book. The book has gained almost divine status in attempts to educate the young. Reading a book is a worthy activity -- playing computer games and watching TV are not.

This is nonsense. There is no more intrinsic educational value in a piece of gaudy pulp fiction ("well, at least he's reading!") than there is in a comparable game or film. But there is far more value in a beautifully written and executed game or film than there is a poorly written book. Filling your head with garbage is still filling your head with garbage whether it is on the screen or in print.

Chris, the High School failure who will not read a book, stays home with his computer now, while adults worry about where he is headed in life. He runs around the Web like a pro, logs into chat rooms and writes up a storm on the keyboard. If he has trouble with a word, he asks an adult to spell it for him and writes it in his notebook. He reads the screen print quite easily. Yet still he is regarded as someone who is uneducable because he won't read a book.

As long as schools continue to be glorified day care centres, staffed with people of linear mindsets and career ambitions, the education system will continue to fail kids like Lucy and Chris. Fortunately, those kids are smart enough to embrace chaos and use it. Education also needs to surrender to chaos, learn from other ways of teaching and draw on the resources of the global village -- that's how big a village it takes to raise a kid these days.

Copyright © 2000 Gail Kavanagh All Rights Reserved

Formerly a regional journalist with News Limited, Gail Kavanagh got into the Chaos thing and reinvented herself as an IT student at the local technical College. She's a freelance journalist in her spare time.