Technology's impact on society: The issue of mass-customized education

The idea of mass-customization in the educational system is introduced. Customized education is an education system in which technologies and organizational skills are combined to provide for the individual's educational needs, when and where they are required. Such a procedure seems to hold the promise of bridging the conflict between the need to react rapidly to changing knowledge based skills on one hand and the relatively conservative social skills that the school has to provide. The paper discusses various aspects of modifications that are needed in the educational system to implement the transition from mass-education to mass-customized-education (MCE) for knowledge acquisition. These aspects include organization, teacher's attitudes and the concept of the two-tier classroom. The infrastructure required for MCE to become operational is described; such infrastructure is based on ideas, which drive mass customization in the production and business worlds.