Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

The present curriculum and its division into airtight compartments is not based on any well thought out conception of contemporary human needs. Still less is it based on any grasp of the future, any understanding of what skills Johnny will require to live in the hurricane's eye of change. It is based on inertia – and a bloody clash of academic guilds, each bent on aggrandizing its budget, pay scales and status.

This obsolete curriculum, furthermore, imposes standardization on the elementary and secondary schools. Youngsters are given little choice in determining what they wish to learn. Variations from school to school are minimal. The curriculum is nailed into place by the rigid entrance requirements of the colleges, which, in turn, reflect the vocational and social requirements of a vanishing society.

In fighting to update education, the prognostic cells of the revolution must set themselves up as curriculum review boards. Attempts by the present educational leadership to revise the physics curriculum, or improve the methods for teaching English or math are piecemeal at best. While it may be important to preserve aspects of the present curriculum and to introduce changes gradually, we need more than haphazard attempts to modernize. We need a systematic approach to the whole problem.

These revolutionary review groups must not, however, set out to design a single allpurpose, permanent new curriculum. Instead, they must invent sets of temporary curricula – along with procedures for evaluation and renovation as time goes by. There must be a systematic way to make curricular changes without necessarily triggering bloody intramural conflict each time.

A fight must also be waged to alter the balance between standardization and variety in the curriculum. Diversity carried to its extreme could produce a non-society in which the lack of common frames of reference would make communication between people even more difficult than it is today. Yet the dangers of social fragmentation cannot be met by maintaining a highly homogeneous education system while the rest of the society races toward heterogeneity.

One way to resolve the conflict between the need for variety and the need for common reference points is to distinguish in education between "data," as it were, and "skills."

Society is differentiating. What is more, we shall never, no matter how refined our predictive tools become, be able to forecast the exact sequence of future states of the society. In this situation, it makes eminent good sense to hedge our educational bets. Just as genetic diversity favors the survival of species, educational diversity increases the odds for the survival of societies. Instead of a standardized elementary and secondary school curriculum in which all students are essentially exposed to the same data base – the same history, math, biology, literature, grammar, foreign languages, etc. – the futurist movement in education must attempt to create widely diversified data offerings. Children should be permitted far greater choice than at present; they should be encouraged to taste a wide variety of short-term courses (perhaps two or three weeks in length) before making longer-term commitments. Each school should provide scores of optional subjects, all based on identifiable assumptions about future needs.

The range of subject matter should be broad enough so that apart from dealing with the "known" (i.e., highly probable) elements of the super-industrial future, some provision would be made for dealing with the unknown, the unexpected, the possible. We might do this by designing "contingency curricula" – educational programs aimed at training people to handle problems that not only do not exist now, but which may, in fact, never materialize. We need, for example, a wide range of specialists to cope with potentially calamitous, though perhaps unlikely, contingencies: back-contamination of the earth from the planets or stars, the need to communicate with extra-terrestrial life, monstrosities produced by genetic experimentation, etc.

Even now we should be training cadres of young people for life in submarine communities. Part of the next generation may well find itself living under the oceans. We should be taking groups of students out in submarines, teaching them to dive, introducing them to underwater housing materials, power requirements, the perils and promises involved in a human invasion of the oceans. And we should be doing this not merely with graduate students, but with children drawn from elementary schools, even the nurseries. Simultaneously, other young people should be introduced to the wonders of outer space, living with or near the astronauts, learning about planetary environments, becoming as familiar with space technology as most teen-agers today are with that of the family car. Still others should be encouraged, not discouraged, from experimenting with communal and other family forms of the future. Such experimentation, under responsible supervision and constructively channeled, should be seen as part of an appropriate education, not as an interruption or negation of the learning process.

The principle of diversity will dictate fewer required courses, increasing choice among esoteric specialties. By moving in this direction and creating contingency curricula, the society can bank a wide range of skills, including some it may never have to use, but which it must have at its instant command in the event our highest probability assumptions about the future turn out to be mistaken.

The result of such a policy will be to produce far more individualized human beings, more differences among people, more varied ideas, political and social sub-systems, and more color.

Unfortunately, this necessary diversification of data offerings will deepen the problems of overchoice in our lives. Any program of diversification must therefore be accompanied by strong efforts to create common reference points among people through a unifying system of skills. While all students should not study the same course, imbibe the same facts, or store the same sets of data, all students should be grounded in certain common skills needed for human communication and social integration.

If we assume a continuing rise in transience, novelty and diversity, the nature of some of these behavioral skills becomes clear. A powerful case can be made, for example, that the people who must live in super-industrial societies will need new skills in three crucial areas: learning, relating and choosing.

Learning. Given further acceleration, we can conclude that knowledge will grow increasingly perishable. Today's "fact" becomes tomorrow's "misinformation." This is no argument against learning facts or data – far from it. But a society in which the individual constantly changes his job, his place of residence, his social ties and so forth, places an enormous premium on learning efficiency. Tomorrow's schools must therefore teach not merely data, but ways to manipulate it. Students must learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them. They must, in short, learn how to learn.

Early computers consisted of a "memory" or bank of data plus a "program" or set of instructions that told the machine how to manipulate the data. Large late-generation computer systems not only store greater masses of data, but multiple programs, so that the operator can apply a variety of programs to the same data base. Such systems also require a "master program" that, in effect, tells the machine which program to apply and when. The multiplication of programs and addition of a master program vastly increased the power of the computer.

A similar strategy can be used to enhance human adaptability. By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education.