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Chapter 18

Education in the Future Tense

    "In the quickening race to put men and machines on the planets, tremendous resources are devoted to making possible a "soft landing." Every sub-system of the landing craft is exquisitely designed to withstand the shock of arrival. Armies of engineers, geologists, physicists, metallurgists, and other specialists concentrate years of work on the problem of landing impact. Failure of any sub-system to function after touch-down could destroy human lives, not to mention billions of dollars worth of apparatus and tens of thousands of man-years of labor.
     Today one billion human beings, the total population of the technology-rich nations, are speeding towards a rendezvous with super-industrialism. Must we experience mass future shock? Or can we, too, achieve a "soft landing?" We are rapidly accelerating our approach. The craggy outlines of the new society are emerging from the mists of tomorrow. Yet even as we speed closer, evidence mounts that one of our most critical sub-systems - education - is dangerously malfunctioning.
     What passes for education today, even in our "best" schools and colleges, is a hopeless anachronism. Parents look to education to fit their children for life in the future. Teachers warn that lack of an education will cripple a child's chances in the world of tomorrow. Government ministries, churches, the mass media - all exhort young people to stay in school, insisting that now, as never before, one's future is almost wholly dependent upon education.
     Yet for all this rhetoric about the future, our schools face backward toward a dying system, rather than forward to the emerging new society. Their vast engergies are applied to cranking out Industrial Men - people tooled for survival in a system that will be dead before they are.
     To help avert future shock, we must create a super-industrial education system. And to do this, we must search for our objectives and methods in the future, rather than the past."