Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  Why, for example, must teaching be organized around such fixed disciplines as English, economics, mathematics or biology? Why not around stages of the human life cycle: a course on birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, career, retirement, death. Or around contemporary social problems? Or around significant technologies of the past and future? Or around countless other imaginable alternatives?

  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."

  A DIVERSITY OF DATA

  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.

  A SYSTEM OF SKILLS

  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.

  Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: "The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstra
ct and back, how to look at problems from a new direction – how to teach himself. Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn."

  Relating. We can also anticipate increasing difficulty in making and maintaining rewarding human ties, if life pace continues its acceleration.

  Listening intently to what young people are saying makes it clear that the once-simple business of forging real friendships has already assumed new complexity for them. When students complain, for instance, that "people can't communicate," they are not simply referring to crossing the generational divide, but to problems they have among themselves as well. "New people in the last four days are all the ones that I remember," writes Rod McKuen, a songwriter and poet currently popular among the youth.

  Once the transience factor is recognized as a cause of alienation, some of the superficially puzzling behavior of young people becomes comprehensible. Many of them, for example, regard sex as a quick way to "get to know someone." Instead of viewing sexual intercourse as something that follows a long process of relationship-building, they see it, rightly or not, as a shortcut to deeper human understanding.

  The same wish to accelerate friendship helps explain their fascination with such psychological techniques as "sensitivity training," "T-grouping," "micro-labs," so-called "touchie-feelie" or non-verbal games, and the whole group dynamics phenomenon in general. Their enthusiasm for communal living, too, expresses the underlying sense of loneliness and inability to "open up" with others.

  All these activities throw participants into intimate psychological contact without lengthy preparation, often without advance acquaintanceship. In many cases, the relationships are short-lived by design, the purpose of the game being to intensify affective relationships despite the temporariness of the situation.

  By speeding the turnover of people in our lives, we allow less time for trust to develop, less time for friendships to ripen. Thus we witness a search for ways to cut through the polite "public" behavior directly to the sharing of intimacy.

  One may doubt the effectiveness of these experimental techniques for breaking down suspicion and reserve, but until the rate of human turnover is substantially slowed, education must help people to accept the absence of deep friendships, to accept loneliness and mistrust – or it must find new ways to accelerate friendship formation. Whether by more imaginative grouping of students, or by organizing new kinds of work-teams, or through variations of the techniques discussed above, education will have to teach us to relate.

  Choosing. If we also assume that the shift toward super-industrialism will multiply the kinds and complexities of decisions facing the individual, it becomes apparent that education must address the issue of overchoice directly.

  Adaptation involves the making of successive choices. Presented with numerous alternatives, an individual chooses the one most compatible with his values. As overchoice deepens, the person who lacks a clear grasp of his own values (whatever these may be) is progressively crippled. Yet the more crucial the question of values becomes, the less willing our present schools are to grapple with it. It is no wonder that millions of young people trace erratic pathways into the future, ricocheting this way and that like unguided missiles.

  In pre-industrial societies, where values are relatively stable, there is little question about the right of the older generation to impose its values on the young. Education concerns itself as much with the inculcation of moral values as with the transmission of skills. Even during early industrialism, Herbert Spencer maintained that "Education has for its object the formation of character," which, freely translated, means the seduction or terrorization of the young into the value systems of the old.

  As the shock waves of the industrial revolution rattled the ancient architecture of values and new conditions demanded new values, educators backed off. As a reaction against clerical education, teaching facts and "letting the student make up his own mind" came to be regarded as a progressive virtue. Cultural relativism and an appearance of scientific neutrality displaced the insistence on traditional values. Education clung to the rhetoric of character formation, but educators fled from the very idea of value inculcation, deluding themselves into believing that they were not in the value business at all.

  Today it embarrasses many teachers to be reminded that all sorts of values are transmitted to students, if not by their textbooks then by the informal curriculum – seating arrangements, the school bell, age segregation, social class distinctions, the authority of the teacher, the very fact that students are in a school instead of the community itself. All such arrangements send unspoken messages to the student, shaping his attitudes and outlook. Yet the formal curriculum continues to be presented as though it were value-free. Ideas, events, and phenomena are stripped of all value implications, disembodied from moral reality.

  Worse yet, students are seldom encouraged to analyze their own values and those of their teachers and peers. Millions pass through the education system without once having been forced to search out the contradictions in their own value systems, to probe their own life goals deeply, or even to discuss these matters candidly with adults and peers. Students hurry from class to class. Teachers and professors are harried and grow increasingly remote. Even the "bull session" – informal, extra-curricular discussions about sex, politics or religion that help participants identify and clarify their values – grow less frequent and less intimate as transience rises.

  Nothing could be better calculated to produce people uncertain of their goals, people incapable of effective decision-making under conditions of overchoice. Super-industrial educators must not attempt to impose a rigid set of values on the student; but they must systematically organize formal and informal activities that help the student define, explicate and test his values, whatever they are. Our schools will continue to turn out industrial men until we teach young people the skills necessary to identify and clarify, if not reconcile, conflicts in their own value systems.

  The curriculum of tomorrow must thus include not only an extremely wide range of data-oriented courses, but a strong emphasis on future-relevant behavioral skills. It must combine variety of factual content with universal training in what might be termed "life know-how." It must find ways to do both at the same time, transmitting one in circumstances or environments that produce the other.

  In this way, by making definite assumptions about the future and designing organizational and curricular objectives based on them, the Councils of the Future can begin to shape a truly super-industrial education system. One final critical step remains, however. For it is not enough to refocus the system on the future. We must shift the time-bias of the individual as well.

  THE STRATEGY OF FUTURENESS

  Three hundred and fifty years after his death, scientists are still finding evidence to support Cervantes' succinct insight into adaptational psychology: "Forewarned fore-armed." Selfevident as it may seem, in most situations we can help individuals adapt better if we simply provide them with advance information about what lies ahead.

  Studies of the reactions of astronauts, displaced families, and industrial workers almost uniformly point to this conclusion. "Anticipatory information," writes psychologist Hugh Bowen, "allows ... a dramatic change in performance." Whether the problem is that of driving a car down a crowded street, piloting a plane, solving intellectual puzzles, playing a cello or dealing with interpersonal difficulties, performance improves when the individual knows what to expect next.

  The mental processing of advance data about any subject presumably cuts down on the amount of processing and the reaction time during the actual period of adaptation. It was Freud, I believe, who said: "Thought is action in rehearsal."

  Even more important than any specific bits of advance information, however, is the habit of anticipation. This conditioned ability to look ahead plays a key role in adaptation. Indeed, one of the hidden clues to successful coping may well lie in the individua
l's sense of the future. The people among us who keep up with change, who manage to adapt well, seem to have a richer, better developed sense of what lies ahead than those who cope poorly. Anticipating the future has become a habit with them. The chess player who anticipates the moves of his opponent, the executive who thinks in long range terms, the student who takes a quick glance at the table of contents before starting to read page one, all seem to fare better.

  People vary widely in the amount of thought they devote to the future, as distinct from past and present. Some invest far more resources than others in projecting themselves forward – imagining, analyzing and evaluating future possibilities and probabilities. They also vary in how far they tend to project. Some habitually think in terms of the "deep future." Others penetrate only into the "shallow future."

  We have, therefore, at least two dimensions of "futureness" – how much and how far. There is evidence that among normal teenagers maturation is accompanied by what sociologist Stephen L. Klineberg of Princeton describes as "an increasing concern with distant future events." This suggests that people of different ages characteristically devote different amounts of attention to the future. Their "time horizons" may also differ. But age is not the only influence on our futureness. Cultural conditioning affects it, and one of the most important cultural influences of all is the rate of change in the environment.

  This is why the individual's sense of the future plays so critical a part in his ability to cope. The faster the pace of life, the more rapidly the present environment slips away from us, the more rapidly do future potentialities turn into present reality. As the environment churns faster, we are not only pressured to devote more mental resources to thinking about the future, but to extend our time horizon – to probe further and further ahead. The driver dawdling along an expressway at twenty miles per hour can successfully negotiate a turn into an exit lane, even if the sign indicating the cut-off is very close to the exit. The faster he drives, however, the further back the sign must be placed to give him the time needed to read and react. In quite the same way, the generalized acceleration of life compels us to lengthen our time horizon or risk being overtaken and overwhelmed by events. The faster the environment changes, the more the need for futureness.