How many times can you recall having asked a teacher ‘Why do I need to know this?’ only to be told ‘because someday you will need it’? It’s been common wisdom for some time that an education that covers a broad range of subjects is critical for our youth. Only recently with the Internet has this idea of Just in Case (JIC) knowledge been challenged. In fact, I’d argue that Just in Case knowledge is a massive waste of resources. In my own experience a large portion of what I learned in obtaining three degrees has either never been needed or was forgotten long ago.

About fifty years ago, it was common practice (even best practice) for businesses to regularly stock excess inventory. The attitude was that having this inventory was valuable, “Just in Case” customer demand proved to be stronger than expected. As we know now, this approach results in huge and unnecessary costs, often failing to curtail product shortages, because a lot of inventory is perishable or time-sensitive, and stock that becomes outdated must be discarded. In many ways, we are at a similar moment regarding the common practice of “Just in Case” education.

As industry moved away from Just in Case (JIT) to Just in Time (JIT), they found they could operate with lower costs and higher quality while providing the customer with the newest possible materials. Oh, if education were only like this. The good news is that the education industry is now moving from just in case knowledge to just in time knowledge. However, the champions of change to just in time are not the traditional Colleges and Universities, but rather the Internet giants such as Apple with Siri and Google with Google Now, and dozens of other companies combining advanced Artificial Intelligence with a human interface.

Just In Time Informers

Siri and Google Now represent a new type of teacher / professor that is – at the moment – best described as a just in time omniscient informer. These informers can answer any factual question by drawing on a nearly infinite database. Additionally, the informers can provide you with ongoing daily news summaries curated based on your interests and perspectives, and even correlated to what your friends and associates are viewing. With the support of an informer, a person need only briefly pause before they are able to access and make use of the entirety of human knowledge.

In many ways, this capability has been around for years in the form of Google and Wikipedia. However, with a human interface such as speech, and the ability to parse language, these informers represent a smarter knowledge bank that is more usable for anyone — including those that are less technically proficient or search-savvy.

Knowledge is Worthless. Knowing how to use Knowledge is Priceless.

With this level of capability as the starting point, it is easy to speculate that in the future this informer technology will advance to provide you with information that you not only want to know but also that you will need to know just before you know that you need it. Already, sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are making suggestions about the people that you need to know.

So what should replace the just in case knowledge paradigm that is now the hallmark of the traditional system? To maximize the use of just in time knowledge, the student of today needs to put more focus on learning how to quickly assimilate new information — how to learn. Education will no longer be for a finite number of years as a part of youth, but rather will be gained at an accelerating pace for an entire lifetime. Every year we will need to get better at quickly learning just in time knowledge.

We need to rethink what we really need to know from our earliest years into our senior years. Something that we learn that is then forgotten or never used is an intellectual luxury that we can no longer afford.

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