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
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 individual'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
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.
Some individuals, of course, project themselves so far into the future for such long periods that their anticipations become escapist fantasies. Far more common, however, are those individuals whose anticipations are so thin and short-range that they are continually surprised and flustered by change.
The adaptive individual appears to be able to project himself forward just the 'right' distance in time, to examine and evaluate alternative courses of action open to him before the need for final decision, and to make tentative decisions beforehand.
Studies by social scientists like Lloyd Warner in the United States and Elliott Jaques in Britain, for example, have shown how important this time element is in management decision-making. The man on the assembly line is given work that requires him to concern himself only with events close to him in time. The men who rise in management are expected, with each successive promotion, to concern themselves with events further in the future.
Sociologist Benjamin D. Singer of the University of Western Ontario, whose field is social psychiatry, has gone further. According to Singer, the future plays an enormous, largely unappreciated part in present behavior. He argues, for instance, that 'the 'self' of the child is in part feedback from what it is toward what it is becoming.' The target toward which the child is moving is his 'future focused role image' – a conception of what he or she wishes to be like at various points in the future.
This 'future focused role image,' Singer writes, 'tends ... to organize and give meaning to the pattern of life he is expected to take. Where, however, there is only a hazily defined or functionally non-existent future role, then the meaning which is attached to behavior valued by the larger society does not exist; schoolwork becomes meaningless, as do the rules of middle-class society and of parental discipline.'
Put more simply, Singer asserts that each individual carries in his mind not merely a picture of himself at present, a self-image, but a set of pictures of himself as he wishes to be in the future. 'This person of the future provides a focus for the child; it is a magnet toward which he is drawn; the framework for the present, one might
