GENTRY — There’s no doubt the world is a crazy place and getting crazier every day. In the past 100 years, we’ve gone from the horse and buggy days to the information age. In the last 50 years, the population of the earth has more than doubled, from 3 billion to 6.8 billion.

At a February parents’ night, James Garner, English and journalism teacher at the Decatur High School, brought up the issue of how these changes will affect our children. There was a time when two people could graduate from high school, get jobs at a factory and make enough money to support a family, he said. But for the most part, those days are over.

Garner showed a fascinating video, downloaded from YouTube. The video was first created by high school teacher Karl Fisch for a staff meeting and its popularity has quickly spread. Since then, Fisch and design agency XPLANE have created a whole series of videos. Some of the facts presented include:

◊In the next 8 seconds 34 babies will be born.

◊ China will soon be the number one English speaking country in the world.◊Four exabytes of unique information will be generated in 2010 - more than in the past 5,000 years put together.

◊Today’s 21 year olds have watched 20,000 hours of television, played 10,000 hours of video games, talked 10,000 hours on the phone, sent and received 250,000 e-mails or instant messages.

◊By 2010 the amount of new information is predicted to double every 72 hours.

◊Nintendo invested more than $140 million in research and development in 2002 alone. The U.S. federal government spent less than half as much on research and innovation ineducation.

◊3,000 new books are published daily.

◊Humanity is increasing the search for knowledge by 50 percent a year.

◊More information is added to the Internet in one week than was available from prehistoric times through the nineteenth century.

◊Americans have accessto 1,000,000,000,000 Web pages, 65,000 iphone applications, 10,500 radio stations, 5,500 magazines and 200-plus cable TV networks.

◊More video was uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than if ABC, NBC, and CBS had been airing new content 24/7/365 since 1948.

◊The first commercial text message was sent in 1992. Today the number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet.

It’s a little bit hard to comprehend. How long can the world keep up this explosive pace? How can we possibly prepare our children to compete in a global economy? Making sure our they have a good education is imperative, but will that be enough?

In his blog, thefischbowl. blogspot.com, Fisch writes that he intends his presentations to start a conversation and make people think. Since my questions are impossible to answer without knowing the future, I suppose that’s my intention as well.

To watch the series of videos, search “education shift” on www.youtube.com.

Janelle Jessen is a reporter for the Decatur Herald. She may be reached by e-mail at janellej @ nwanews .com.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 03/31/2010