Education is also one of those places people hate spending money on - kinda like daycare and babysitting. My school district was so poor at one point that the school I was in got condemned by the Fire Marshall and they moved us out into portable classroom buildings. Remodeling all of the schools that had been built in the 50s and seldom fixed drove the district into bankruptcy, and was seen as this huge scandalous thing when it was the only responsible thing to do.

Of course you're not going to see change if people don't want to spend money on it - and usually when they do it's pretty demanding (see the standardized test stuff).

In a lot of areas population change is a complicating factor. The elementary school I attended has since closed, along with 2 or 3 others in the district. High school graduating classes are also substantially smaller. That is a huge hit to the budget.

An area with a growing population would have problems too, having to find money to construct space that may or may not be needed in 10 years.

I agree with your point. Institutions have been slow. And will be slow. I'm not complaining about this...

I'm more complaining about why nothing has been done outside of institutions.

Why haven't private companies created technology and services to serve students? For example: Why does half my class take notes with a pen and paper, and the other half use Microsoft word? Shouldn't a private company find a better way?

Pen and paper is fantastic. Phenomenally simple to use and reliable. So adaptive; you can make a mark literally anywhere on the paper, and make it any shape you can imagine. You can mix text and images with a breathtaking fluidity, with colour switching whenever you like. You can take the piece of paper and fold it, roll it, punch holes in it, spill things on it, it just keeps on going. The format hasn't changed for centuries, and won't change for centuries to come, essentially because it's near perfect - people will be able to view marking on paper, made today, for centuries to come.

You can mix and match your pens and paper without any fear of interface problems - a pen bought a century ago in Germany will work with paper made next year in Argentina. You can even pick up a piece of paper that a different pen was using, and carry on adding to the content with whatever pen or pencil you've got in your pocket. It's a complete, self-contained information display system. I could hand a piece of paper I wrote on to someone from the other side of the world and they'd be able to use it.

Anything looking to replace pen and paper is going to have to be seriously amazing. I'm genuinely astounded that people choose to make notes with Microsoft word instead. The only advantage I can see to that is that you can change what you wrote later (if that is an advantage).

I hear you. I too love paper. I too am astounded by the versatility, simplicity and beauty of it. It will not be replaced for my personal notebooks. And yes, something to replace pen and paper would have to be astounding.

But I still have problems with pen and paper.

I like the ability to add to notes and change them. Professors sometimes meander about in lectures, and I sometimes want to reorganize the ideas they present.

You cannot search efficiently with paper. I have terrible hand writing on paper. Papers wrinkle and drive me crazy. I write slower than I type - and it's assumed (by professors) that people are typing so they teach at that speed (ppt doesn't help). Paper cannot be as easily shared as documents.

With notes (this worked for me, and I imagine it would work for others):

Treat the notes you took in class as a rough draft. After class, revise your notes into a final draft. This way you can reorganize the ideas, simplify example problems, and fix any spacing issues or spelling mistakes. This helps you learn the material since you are working with it while it is still fresh in your mind, and makes studying much easier in the future.

> Shouldn't a private company find a better way?

But they do. When I went to apply for work on the NASA Space Shuttle in the early 1970s, I entered a room filled with college degree holders, and I didn't have one. But I had something better -- the prior night I had drawn up a circuit diagram showing how I intended to solve their technical problem. When the interviewer saw the diagram, he cleared his throat, rose from his chair, went into the other room and told the college degree holders that the position had been filled.

Things are even better now -- because of the speed of technical change, companies are more willing to consider life experience and other factors apart from formal education. I have a young friend who dropped out of high school and was almost instantly hired by Google, for an excellent reason -- he knows a lot about the kinds of things Google cares about.

My point is that the chasm between the real world and the classroom has never been greater, and students need to listen to many different voices, not just those of teachers.