Personal-care aide will be the fastest growing job from 2012 to 2022, among categories with more than 25,000 positions, the Labor Department said in a new report. The field will grow by nearly 50% to 1.8 million jobs.
I could envision a scenario in which personal services of all sorts become more important. For example, here is an idea from IBM.
by next year, Watson will be your personal shopping assistant. Store associates will also have similar intelligent tech providing them instant product information, customer loyalty data, sales histories, user reviews, blogs and magazines, so that when you do need to talk with another human, they know exactly how to help.
IBM thinks in terms of technology it can sell to large enterprises. I tend to think in terms of disintermediation, in which large enterprises are no longer needed.
So IBM thinks about adding personalization to an existing classroom. I think about getting away from classrooms and going back to tutors. Imagine a world with tutors instead of schools.
Schools keep you kids around all day, and thereby waste most of the day. For parents, that is as much a feature as a bug, because they need schools to supervise their kids. But if you were to re-organize schooling into a day-care component and a tutoring component, you might find benefits in getting rid of the enterprise that we call a school.
So we might find that in the future there are fewer school administrators and fewer classroom teachers, but there are a lot more day-care supervisors and tutors.
Certainly parents value schools as day-care. However, taxpayers don’t think they’re paying for day-care. They’re told it’s all education, and that’s why it’s worth all the money. A more honest school (“fewer school administrators and fewer classroom teachers, but … a lot more day-care supervisors and tutors”) may be a harder sell.
On the other hand, some taxpayers do value the day-care component, both as a positive (“kids need something to do all day”) and as avoiding a negative (“I don’t want kids roaming the streets, bored and getting into trouble.”)
Or not. This is the problem of competing restaurants. Without sufficient division of labor and specialization, the idea of everyone tutoring others children disappears. The wealthy likely do hire tutors but tutors can’t afford to hire tutors and we can’t all be wealthy by definition so while there may be more tutors than presently, there is no society of tutors.
We need to change the child labor laws. Perhaps legalize educational jobs like tutoring. Also granulate high school to subject credits.
I would argue that school is intended to benefit the public, not parents. (http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/not-why-this-just-why-not-that/) I would also point out that school time isn’t really wasted. While our objectives are absurd, the bulk of kids do learn to read and write and calculate. We could do a better job by setting expectations based on cognitive ability, but even without that our educational system does amazingly well considering the challenges..
Leaving aside the problem of cost, tutors don’t scale, and most kids aren’t motivated enough to learn. So the income levels from, say, working class to low-level professionals would be hard hit. Low income kids, more likely to be low IQ, wouldn’t have tutors at all, and would run wild. By high school, they’d be extremely dangerous. Teachers are cheaper than prison guards, and I don’t mean that in the romanticized sense (http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/unstructured-musings-on-choice/)
One of the least acknowledged facts of public education in this country is that the rich can buy their way out of it (but not do much better), and we obsess about the deficiencies it offers for the poor. Meanwhile, it does a bangup job for the middle and working class. All the “choice” alternatives, as well as all the progressive reforms aimed at the achievement gap, hurt the abilities of schools to deliver to that demographic. Given that we get the best bang for the public education dollar from precisely that group, it strikes me as foolish to mess with it.
Anyway, no, tutors won’t catch on, with or without daycare.