LEARNING FOR TOMORROW: The Role of the Future in Education

I have seen the future and it works"" sounds almost quaint now. Our own experience tells us that a great deal affecting our lives in big and small ways does not work. We seem to lack, to paraphrase Ralph Nader, the capacity not so much for finding solutions to our problems but for bringing the two together -- thus, the cliche that we can go to the moon but can't make our cities livable. In this provocative collection of original essays, the author of Future Shock and 18 other contributors discuss, from various points of view, the above subtitle. Toffler maintains that all education springs from images of the future. The difficulty nowadays is that it approaches so rapidly and change has been so accelerated that the schools and colleges do not equip their students to deal with life in truly meaningful or even satisfactory ways. Learning is divorced from work, technological advance from social responsibility, thought from action. But is there really a way to ""teach"" the future? These sociologists, psychologists and humanists think so -- in an experimental course at a Melbourne, Florida, high school, social studies teacher Priscilla Griffith explains how her class planned an innovative downtown area for their city for the year 2000; Billy Rochas, in his Program for the Study of the Future, had his University of Massachusetts students participate in a founding convention for the ""new state of Appalachia"" for which they proposed legislation, designed a flag, etc. A significant if somewhat specialized book -- and important chiefly to educators.