Some of the most celebrated education reform efforts today serve to make instruction more difficult. Personalized learning, project-based learning, mastery-based learning—they all require more work of teachers and more work of students.

But several speakers at the LearnLaunch Across Boundaries conference on education technology and innovation, recently held in Boston, argued that these reforms are not simply trends that will come and go, but the evolution of an education system that, in the scope of human history, is still quite young.

Devin Vodicka, chief impact officer at AltSchool and a former superintendent of California’s Vista Unified School District, pointed out that the last transformation of the education system occurred during the Industrial Revolution. Education went from being localized—think one-room schoolhouses—to mass produced. Flexibility decreased over what would be taught and when, but quality went up and access went up. The number of students graduating from high school skyrocketed during the years between 1900 and about 1970.

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