According to the Daily Telegraph, the new chief executive of the Independent Schools Commission, a former Rear Admiral called Chris Parry, believes that “children will learn by downloading information directly into their brains within 30 years.”
The article continues that Parry told the Times Educational Supplement: “It’s a very short route from wireless technology to actually getting the electrical connections in your brain to absorb that knowledge.”
Actually, it is highly unlikely that this will ever be a possibile. Downloading information to the brain, or, conversely, uploading information encoded in the brain to a computer, is the stuff of science fiction – Parry readily acknowledges that his prediction was inspired by The Matrix – and will probably always remain in that realm.
Such claims are often put forward by over-optimistic futurologists such as Ray Kurzweil, but it’s not the kind of thing that one would expect – or hope – to hear from somebody who is in charge of educational policy at 1,300 schools.