With only 12 years left in this millenium, the pressure for change in the American educational system grows ever greater. The high school graduating class of the year 2000 enters the first grade this fall, and there is good reason to worry that today’s education may be inadequate, or even irrelevant to life in the twenty-first century.

Faced with the challenge to prepare students for this new era, the more conservative educational thinkers and planners have begun urging upon the nation their own image of the future: an idealized version of the past. Their vision, the unfulfilled and resurrected dream of the 1950s, projects an ever more competitive world in which the best capitalist wins, and the competitor most imbued with traditional Judeo-Christian values and virtues, wins biggest. It is a world of compartmentalized knowledge and skills in which the compartment labelled ‘all things American’ dominates. Its heroes are male, white and western, and its educational credo is, ‘back to the basics’.

Even many who would deny any affinity with these conservative forces accept this view of our children’s future and their educational needs. It is true the more moderate reformers are aware of, and want youngsters prepared for, the post-50s trend toward a high-technology society. But technology education is still conceived as an add-on to current programs, rather than as a force with the power to revolutionize and re-shape the nature of learning itself.

Curiously, given the amount of ferment the subject of ‘education’ has produced in the last few years, only a handful of educators are looking down the short road to the twenty-first century and questioning the basic structure of contemporary education. What ought to be the goal of public education at this historical juncture? Are students best served by continuing to learn a collection of discrete and unrelated subjects and skills? What kind of curriculum should be available for young people growing up in an interdependent world of instantaneous mass communications? And who should make the decisions about what kids ought to learn?

These are certainly good questions to be asking. But the answers, in order to contribute to a forward-looking reshaping of the educational system, must be based on a sophisticated and realistic grasp of the world our students will inherit.

For contrary to the conservatives’ suppositions, the world is not, nor will it ever be again, the one we grew up in. It has already become a global community — economically, politically and culturally interdependent. In the face of this reality, the call for education and re-training to increase our ‘competitive edge’ is a prescription for disaster. For competition is precisely what has brought the world to the brink of catastrophe, and we will not cure our global illness by increasing the dose of the substance that caused it.

We also know that the youth of today will become adults in a world no longer ruled by western values and powers. The influence of Japan is already a force to be reckoned with; but we will also be influenced in ways we can scarcely imagine yet by the ‘Third World’, home to nearly 90 per cent of the planet’s population, and whose grassroots citizens are increasingly demanding a role in shaping their own destinies. In as much as our international political and economic systems have essentially shut most of these peoples out of the important decision-making processes, a restructuring of our international institutions appears inevitable.

The great changes impacting our lives are not limited to international affairs, of course. New technologies — from genetic engineering to robotized manufacturing — already confront us with moral and practical challenges to our most basic assumptions about life. Moreover, emanating from the sciences and from a wide variety of spiritual philosophies are new definitions of what it means to be human, new perceptions of the earth as a living organism, and new insights into the subtle relationship between people and planet. All these waves of change are intersecting and reinforcing one another, thus guaranteeing the emergence of a new world view at least as powerful and sweeping as any humanity has ever experienced. A new paradigm for a new civilization is trying to be born, and the reality every educator must now face is that without knowing the precise outlines of this paradigm, we are required to prepare ourselves, and our children, to greet it.

We can no longer afford, therefore, either in terms of money or expenditure of human energy, an educational system that models itself on the premises of the past, or is a pastiche of processes and subjects constantly changed to reflect this year’s social or political agenda. Nor can we afford to continue arguing about whether educational reform should focus on ‘process’ or ‘content’, since the structural reform so badly needed requires all of the above. Clearly we must break the habit of settling for cosmetic changes in education and begin rebuilding from the ground up.

In pluralistic societies this rebuilding must go forward at both national and local levels; the resulting programs will have both shared and unique features. But however the reformation occurs, and whatever its ultimate manifestation, there are certain principles and building blocks which should form the basis of any system or program if we are serious about equipping youngsters to thrive in the twenty-first century. My own short list of these crucial elements is the following:

(1) A globalized curriculum

The new curriculummust contend not only with the familiar dictum that students should be preparedto function as responsible citizens of their own nation, but with the relatively new awareness that they will be increasingly called upon to live and work as citizens of the global community, and as passengers on spaceship earth. Education must serve both these domestic and international needs simultaneously, and one way to do so is to provide a national core curriculum consisting of some innovative ‘study areas’ every student in the country will engage with. These study areas would focus the student’s attention on the various relationships — past and present — between the student’s own nation and the major social, political, economic, ecological and technological developments in the world at large.

What I am suggesting is not a series of courses that every student must take, but some common local/global themes, subjects and issues to be shaped by state and local educational communities into the specific curriculum appropriate to a given body of students. Such a ‘globalized’ curriculum would allow students to discover their interdependence and common humanity with the rest of the world’s peoples, while at the same time clarifying the unique contribution of their own society to the totality of world civilization.*

(2) Interdisciplinary learning

One of the hallmarks of today’s curriculum is the separation of knowledge into sacrosanct disciplines and subjects. As a result, we are unable, as the expression goes, to see the forest for the trees. But in a world where we are often required to think and act in terms of relationships, integration and synthesis, it makes little psychological or strategic sense to learn exclusively in terms of pieces, parts and categories. Better for both self and society is a bedrock of interdisciplinary learning that stimulates one’s natural tendency to gain and use knowledge holistically.

Designing interdisciplinary education, however, requires more than simply combining elements of several subjects or disciplines together and then jumping from one to another. If studies are conceived, from the very beginning, so as to help students find the meaning in a significant body of knowledge — rather than to convey the facts and data in some chosen subject — the result will quite naturally be interdisciplinary. Specialization, whether in biology or calculus, novel writing or etching, then becomes a means of illuminating the nature of forests by understanding its trees.

(3) Student-centered teaching

Somewhere along the line we have forgotten that the true meaning of educare, the root of ‘education’ is ‘to draw out’ what is inherently within the person. Instead, our teaching has been designed to ‘put in’ to a passive and captive student audience the information we have required them to absorb. But this top-down and authoritarian pedagogy can never nourish the growth of an adult able to thrive in a world which requires the confident capacity to make wise decisions in the midst of complexity and change.

Our goal should be to identify and prepare teachers who will seek to coax out and liberate the student’s talents and abilities, and to guide the student’s quest for self-knowledge. For this to occur, these teachers must have the capacity to teach with the student at the center of the learning process. They must be able to understand the psychological, intellectual and physical workings of their students and to form nurturing bonds with them. They need not only to understand the material they teach, but be able to communicate its meaning and relevance to everyday life. And most of all, teachers should love the process of helping a learner gain new understanding and with it, a greater measure of consciousness.

(4) Individualized programming

A central feature of our emerging livestyle is the capacity technology affords us to select and shape our communications to and from the rest of the world. We can learn or share almost anything if we have the right hardware and software, and with the information explosion, we can — and must — have the ability to screen and tailor this information to our own unique needs.

This same technology should be used to tailor various aspects of students’ education to their own individual needs. Intellectual growth is demonstrably faster, and self-esteem higher, when students proceed at their own pace — something computers make possible. And just as important, individualized programming teaches students to take responsibility for their own learning. This is a skill they will need in a fast-changing society, and where they will need continually to re-educate themselves for frequent changes of career and to make good use of more and more leisure time.

(5) Serving society

Much of today’s education in industrialized nations almost totally isolates students from any productive interaction with the larger society in which they live. As a result, young people are denied the rewards of contributing to the world, have little stake in society, and feel alienated from adults. Moreover, in that isolated world of schooling which forms their most consistent experience of social relations, they learn it is competition, self-interest and conformity that ultimately pay off.

These are not the conditions which will give rise to the kinds of adults who can bring world civilization back from the brink of disaster and lead it into a new era. What we need are people who see self-development and service to society as two sides of the same coin, and for whom creative cooperation is a galvanizing ideal. These attitudes should be stimulated in the school, both by what goes on within the classroom and through learning activities taking place in the community. If, for example, most (rather than a few) schools provided inducements and opportunities for all students to get ‘A’s’ by helping one another achieve, and gave student service to the community the same import and credit as academic study, we would be on the right track.

Genuine educational reform, built upon such elements, will have a beneficient effect on the entire society. But — and this is the ‘Catch-22’ — these reforms will only go forward if the society is ready for them. For no matter what changes we make in the classroom, if our social values and strategies continue to deify materialism, and if we continue to see human beings as machines to be manipulated for ideological and self-serving ends, our students will get the message.

Structural reform in schooling must go hand-in-hand with a restructuring of society. All the agitation about revamping school systems is, therefore, a very good sign indeed of social change to come.

[* A new ‘Framework’ for such a globalized curriculum is now being experimented with in several US school districts. For more information contact Willard Kniep, Global Perspectives in Education, 45 John Street, New York, NY 10038 ]

A model citizen for the 21st century

• Accept responsibility for understanding local and global conditions which are detrimental to society, and feel both willing and able to help improve them.
• Recognize the interdependence of the world’s cultures and systems, and the implications that has for how one lives.
• Grasp the synergistic relationship between their little part of life to the whole of the world, and the linkage between self and society.
• Possess and have internalized such universal and self-actualizing values as justice and equity, cooperation for the common good, the primacy of love, and service.
• Be willing to share: time, material resources, and one’s own energy.