It’s great that Steve Jobs has raised the issue of unions holding back quality of education, by preventing bad teachers from being fired.

Robert Scoble adds that in addition, teachers should be paid better. Hey, Robert- want to see what the world looks like where good teachers makes as much as athletes or investment bankers?

Just go check out South Korea. And soon, it may very well happen in the US.

Kenneth Gronbach, writer of a fascinating blog on demographic trends and marketing, points out that the US is about to face a big change in supply and demand for education. Just as millions of additional Generation Y students enter the school system, millions of Baby Boom teachers will be retiring, unreplaced by the much smaller Generation X.

The result, to build on Ken’s piece, should lead to fierce competition between students for declining supply of quality education.

The pressure will rise for good teachers will start to be paid much, much more than mediocre ones.

Education is one of the last gargantuan service industries that has yet to restructure for a global, post-industrial world. Competition among suppliers, pay according to merit, radical adoption of technology to improve delivery of service…all these and more are just waiting to happen.

Geni, a new geneology website, is certainly growing virally.

I signed up a week ago just to try it, and added a couple family members names and emails….today I get an email update saying that my family tree is now up to 84 people!

Which is great, except that it’s going to rapidly run out of steam because the most recently added folks (great-grandparents, etc.) don’t have emails and are unlikely to contribute any further names to our tree because they’re all dead.

I’m guessing that means Geni is a great way to spread a very wide, but thin, layer of geneology across the world. But to go back more than 1 generation, it will have to fall back on the same old tools and techniques that others before it have relied upon. Or am I missing something?