The First Technological Revolution

In the 2001 fifth edition of The Uses of the University, Clark Kerr noted the emergence of what he called the first revolution in educational technology in five centuries — referring to the early promise of online learning. The claim was bolder than it sounded: Kerr was positioning online education as comparable in historical significance to the printing press, which had previously been the only technology that substantially restructured how education was delivered. He warned that education is not only about the transfer of factual knowledge — a statement that reads, two decades later, as both prescient and insufficient. Prescient because the distinction between knowledge transfer and judgment development turned out to be the hinge on which the university's survival turns. Insufficient because the AI systems of 2025 did not merely continue the trajectory Kerr identified; they accelerated it by an order of magnitude and shifted its character.