The public school teachers had gone on strike Feb. 20, 1997, over a variety of issues - primarily low salaries - and had shut down all public schools in the state.
They had employed the standard industrial-age practice at the time of surrounding the state's aging school buildings with human picket lines (educators carrying paper signs and blocking access to physical facilities full of paper books, files and reports).
This resulted in almost 200,000 students being forced to stay at home or to make other arrangements. As a result, many parents also had to stay at home to take care of their children.
Most parents were concerned about the lost learning opportunities and tried to find educational programming available on the CATV network and, for those who had computers in the home, educational resources available on the Internet.
There was a run on educational CD-ROMs and educational videos at the stores, as well as a large increase in sales and books and educational software at the local book stores.
Since most parents had to keep up with their office work loads during this time, many families soon purchased fax machines and invested in home computers to keep in touch with their offices while working at home.
Some families began to team up so that one family each day in rotation would take all of the kids for one day, while others went to work or worked in peace at home.
Older kids in the group were often asked to assist younger ones with their lessons. And children were asked to take more responsibility for their own learning, which most did with considerable success.
As a community service, Oceanic Cable used the day-time hours of its Pay-Per-View channels to broadcast a wide range of educational programming, with each channel gearing programming for a different age group.
And the Oceanic Cable, GTE Hawaiian Tel and GST Hawaii OnLine Internet service providers also quickly created educational resource sites staffed by professional educators from the private sector.
Chat line and e-mail traffic soared. And interest in complete on-line K-12 learning environments such as those provided by the Lightspan Partnership and various CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and WWWeb publishers increased dramatically.
As the strike wore on with neither the state nor the HSTA budging in their positions, people fell into a routine. Most businesses were forced to make accommodations for tele-work and improved on the process slowly but surely. People got to know the families and the resources in their neighborhoods that could be called upon for assistance with both work and education issues.
And commuters noticed how uncrowded the roads were now that so many people were tele-learning and tele-working.
I can't remember exactly how the 1997 strike ended, but I do remember that eventually many of the teachers got tired of walking around empty buildings (usually buildings that they didn't particularly enjoy teaching in anyway) and went home, logged into the Internet, and started providing educational services to the community on-line as independent contractors.
Many of the Oceanic temporary services eventually became permanent, inexpensive pay-per-learn channels. The Internet services expanded dramatically.
The neighborhood-based home schools eventually became permanent with the services of previous DOE teachers available part-time either in person or on-line. Many of the tele-work arrangements also became permanent, as businesses realized how much could be saved in the rent of office space if many people worked at home all the time or at least part of the time.
Although the downside to all of this was a glut of empty office space on the market and hundreds of empty school buildings (some converted to low-cost housing for the homeless, others to additional prison space), the 1997 teachers' strike became the pivotal event in the transformation of the state's economy from an industrial age, tourism dependent one to an information age, geographically independent one.
Large numbers of people started to tele-work, when they (as well as the businesses they worked for) realized that once on the Internet, you can work from almost anywhere and work for anyone almost anywhere. Electronic work opportunities poured into the state from all over the world and, by 2001, tele-work-based businesses had surpassed tourism as the state's primary economic engine.
Although no one enjoyed the teachers' strike of 1997, everyone agrees that it was the best possible thing that could have happened to transform education and work in Hawaii. I wonder what the current learning facilitator strike will lead to.
