The Future

The Future? You’re Standing In It!

A Design and Technology Perspective on the Future of Schooling in the Information Age

Hedley Beare

Professor Emeritus of Education

University of Melbourne

A keynote paper for the ACET2000 Conference ‘Technology Education: Designing Tomorrow Today’, the Biennial Conference of the Australian Council of Education through Technology, conducted at Daramalan College, Downer, Australian Capital Territory from 10-14 January 2000

(To View the powepoint presentation shown at the conference - click here!)

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Introduction: Schools and Change

As one who has been giving talks about the future of schools for at least a quarter of a century and has therefore been in a position to observe how things change (Beare, 1990, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998), I agree with the comment by Bill Gates in his Business @ The Speed of Thought (1999: 69): ‘We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten’.

Put alongside Gates’ comment the motto which the great pioneer medical researcher Sir William Osler used for his working life (it is a quotation from the essayist Thomas Carlyle): ‘Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand’, There may indeed be a lot of change in the wind, but the future is set in train by the practical things we do today. And there are some obvious things which we can do now to prepare ourselves for some aspects of the near future which we already know about. After all, today is simply yesterday’s tomorrow!

The popular view is that schools throughout this past century have been remarkably resistant to change. That is entirely incorrect. There have been changes, incremental, fundamental and far-reaching, since primary and secondary education became universal in industrialized countries; and there are going to be more - new ways of viewing knowledge, new ways of conceiving of planetary systems, new patterns of interactions across the world, new definitions for the world of work, new approaches to birth control, child-bearing and child-rearing, and powerful new information technology. Schools are already remaking what is taught, the way teachers allow themselves to be employed, the way the school is managed, and how the school earns its operating dollars.

To introduce the conference theme ‘Designing Tomorrow Today’, this paper, the first of the keynotes, has four parts. It consists of:

• A frame-setting introduction;

• Then a section discussing the Information Revolution, the knowledge-based society which it has brought into existence, and how that society is affecting schooling.

• The next section lists what we already know about the internationalised school of the future, what it will look like, how its curriculum will be organized, and how it will operate.

• Finally, the paper discusses how breakthroughs occur as a result of the very imagination and creativity which is implicit in the Design and Technology field.

I therefore set out not to be speculative, but rather to synthesise what is already known about the school of the future, at least for the next decade or so. You need this kind of baseline as a starting point. When it is all put together it may startle you, but none of it should be new.

Section 1.

The Technology Revolution and the Knowledge-based society

First, then, the framework.

The arrival of the Twenty-First Century has been accompanied by a plethora of discussions about what were the key events and turning points of the Twentieth Century, who were the most influential people, who were the top ten scientists, athletes, writers, politicians, and so on. Some magazines have even tried to do this exercise for the past millennium. What those exercises have brought home is how difficult it would have been in the year 1900 to predict some of the huge waves of development coming at us from out of the very near future. For example:

• Thomas Edison was 53 at the turn of the century. He had invented the telephone transmitter in 1878, and the electric light, the phonograph (the forerunner of our CDs) in 1877, and batteries. Who could have foreseen then how those inventions would revolutionize the world?

• Marconi, born in 1874, was only 26 in 1900. He had just arrived in England from Italy and established the Marconi Company (in 1897, at age 23). In 1909 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for inventing radio and the technology of broadcasting.

• Madame Marie Curie, who studied physics and maths at the Sorbonne, married Pierre Curie in 1895. In 1898, they jointly announced the discovery of radium. They received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903, and the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911. To them we owe X-rays, cancer cures, radioactivity, the atomic bomb and the nuclear power industry.

• Albert Einstein, born in 1879, was just 21 when the Twentieth Century arrived. After studying science in Germany, he tried to become a maths teacher but was debarred because he was a Jew. So from 1901 to 1905 he went back to university to study theoretical physics, and in 1915 published his General Theory of Relativity which virtually transformed our view of the cosmos. He fled to USA from the Nazis in October 1933, became a professor at Yale, and never returned to Germany. The US gave him the platform to convert the world from the Newtonian view which had dominated for about three centuries.

• Henry Ford made his first ‘gasoline buggy’ in 1893; it could travel at 25 mph. He formed the Ford Automobile Company in 1899, based on ‘progressive assembly’. The motor car has changed the world; and his methods of mass production revolutionized the manufacturing industry. Would we have known all that was coming in 1900?

• Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first petrol-driven powered flight in 1903 at Kitty Hawk. In 1900, would many have predicted how aeroplanes would transform the planet?

The one overwhelming difference between 1900 and 2000 is the speed at which change is occurring. Bill Gates argues that Information Technology is not only revolutionizing our lives but that it is doing so at incredible speed. Between 1978 and 1998, in the space of only twenty years, he says, ‘the microprocessor’s capability has grown ten thousand-fold’. If the production of cars and breakfast cereals had followed the same development pattern as the microprocessor, he points out, ‘a mid-size car would (now) cost $27 and a box of cereal a penny [or one cent]’ (ibid.: 143). Dale Mann of Columbia University, who has pioneered the inclusion of multimedia approaches into schools, has made a similar point about the curriculum. He says,

Had schooling advanced at the same rate as computers have since 1950, the twelve years of kindergarten through (to) senior high school could be accomplished in ten minutes for (the cost of) three cents (Mann, 1992.: 228)

The Information Revolution:

There are two over-arching facets of life-on-earth which we know about but which are driving the whole world community relentlessly into new territory and changing the patterns of our lives. The first is the Technology Revolution. It has introduced a new era in the history of the world, making much of the paraphernalia of the previously dominant industrial economy obsolescent and even unworkable. Gates (1999: xiii-xiv, xviii) asserts that we have ‘been in the Information Age for about thirty years’. Peter Drucker explains in his New Realities (1989), a book often quoted as encapsulating the new paradigm, that since the 1970s the developed world entered ‘a political terra incognita with few familiar landmarks to guide us’. Hammer and Champy (1994), the inventors of ‘corporate re-engineering’, seem to agree. ‘The reality that organizations have to confront’, they say, is that ‘the old ways of doing business - the division of labour around which companies have been organized since Adam Smith first articulated the principle - simply don’t work anymore’.

One of the symptoms of our dislocation with the new period in history was the ‘school reform movement’ of the 1980s and 1990s. It is now widely accepted that the piecemeal adaptation of schooling which characterized that reform movement has been ineffective; it doesn’t work either (Beare and Boyd, 1993; Caldwell, 1998; Caldwell and Hayward, 1998; Edison, 1994; Stoll and Fink, 1996; Stringfield et al, 1996; Townsend et al, 1999). But schools are not alone in this discovery. Hammer (in Beyond Reengineering, 1996) has said that ‘the revolution that has destroyed the traditional corporation began with efforts to improve it’. Concerning schools, Perelman (School’s Out, 1996: 20) is led to conclude:

The nations that stop trying to ‘reform’ their education and training institutions and choose instead to totally replace them with a brand-new, high-tech learning system will be the economic powerhouses through the twenty-first century.

The enterprises and societies which cannot adapt or remodel themselves will simply fall behind, or perhaps may not even survive.

Some countries and systems are better placed than others to make the transition to the new paradigm. They include those schools and systems which have dispensed with large bureaucratic and centralized structures, which are collegial rather than hierarchical in the way they operate, which have installed the new information systems and which use them naturally in their learning programs, which can accommodate a curriculum that is networked and branching rather than linear, which foster digital as well as print literacy, which use international rather than parochial benchmarks, which encourage mobility and flexibility rather than static and standardized approaches, which have professionalised their teaching teams, which try to exploit the creativity of their best personnel, and which have deregulated and freed up their operations wherever they can do so.

To accommodate to the emerging, knowledge-based society, some ideas from the past have to be reworked or simply thrown away as obsolete baggage. Australia’s manufacturing and its industrial economy - this country’s participation in the Industrial Revolution - grew strongly between the two World Wars, bringing with it a package of standard employment patterns, a set of business practices and management modes, imposing a way of life on its participants, and a parcel of social and political conventions.

The one-best-way of manufacturing transformed society, and became the template, the metaphor, to explain many things other than factories. During the Industrial Revolution, the artisans’ crafts, once associated with the village, were broken down into their component parts and processes, were systematized by experts, they were mechanized and each part of the process was put in the hands of process workers, and thus commodities were mass-produced. The production line was born. The large-scale organization - the big factory, the big corporation -produced a standard form of organization called bureaucracy. Big cities developed too, as the process workers for the factories clustered in dormitory suburbs around the places of production, causing a population migration from the country to the cities. A new distribution of wealth occurred based on competition and profit-making.

Mass education came into existence with mass production. The State-provided secondary schools arrived, established in buildings which somewhat resembled factories. The curriculum was divided into specialist subjects with sequenced processes, and operated on the rationale of a production line. They were controlled by large government bureaucracies called Education Departments.

The transformation was not limited to schools. As Toffler points out in The Third Wave (1980), the same pattern took over everywhere - in railroads and transport; in the invention of the post office and mass-produced newspapers; in ‘the music industry’ and theatre; with prisons, hospitals, and welfare systems; with the emergence of the emporium, ‘department stores’, and then the ‘supermarket’. A host of voluntary organizations took the same shape - churches, political parties, trade unions, libraries, recreational groups, chambers of commerce. There was a common architecture for society’s amenities.

In...country after country, social inventors, believing the factory to be the most advanced and efficient agency for production, tried to embody its principles in other organizations as well. Schools, hospitals, prisons, government bureaucracies, and other organizations thus took on many of the characteristics of the factory - its division of labour, its hierarchical structure and its metallic impersonality (Toffler, 1980: 45).

So throughout society, and embedded in shops, businesses, communal life and career patterns, the same six characteristics of the industrial economy existed; standardization, specialization, synchronization, concentration, maximization, and centralization. These characteristics are still evident, for example, in the structures controlling the employment and deployment of teachers.

Not surprisingly, technical education also arrived with industrialization. Vocational streams were added to secondary school curricula, apprenticeships expanded in number, technical education became an entity in its own right, and Technical High Schools were invented (although the private schools continued to scorn anything technical). After the Second World War, ‘secondary education for all’ (universal secondary education) became accepted, post-secondary education was made accessible in a way not experienced between the wars, and there was growing emphasis in many occupations on gaining a formal credential and the possession of prior (preservice) training before a person was allowed to practise.

The conventions which belong with an industrial economy will be overtaken once the economy moves into a post-industrial, post-modern, knowledge-based, and internationalised marketplace (Beare and Slaughter, 1993). It is dangerous to hold on to the conventions of that era as justifications for present and future practice. The people who try to conserve those outmoded patterns tend to be those who gained their positions of eminence from those systems of thinking. Firstly, then, we need to note that the Information Revolution has displaced the Industrial Revolution in most developed countries of the world.

Internationalisation, globalisation:

The second over-arching factor is internationalisation. Put simply, the world’s population growth has jettisoned us into a new era in history. The point needs little embellishment, but we can illustrate it as follows.

Five hundred years ago (in 1500) the world’s total population was half a billion - about a third of the population of China alone - and it had taken since the dawn of human civilization to build up to that figure. We began the Twentieth Century with a world population of 1.6 billion people; we ended it with a population of six billion! Within fifty years - within the life of the generation of students now at school, it will be 9 billion (estimated to be reached by 2054). Within half a century, we will have added to the world’s population six times the population of the entire world as it was in 1500. There will be huge implications across the whole globe and in every facet of human life as a result of this population escalation. Among other things, this generation at school will become unequivocally international in their outlook, in their concerns, in their lifestyle, in their politics, in their religious views, in their work and employment patterns.

Further, it is profoundly important to note what the composition of that world population will be.

• A much larger proportion than we have been used to will be old.

• A third of them will be children.

• Half the world’s people will be under 25 - the parents of the next generation.

• By 2050, India (1.529 pop.) will have displaced China (1.478 pop.) as the world’s most populous country.

• Asia and Africa will account for 80% of the world’s people; Europe and North America combined will be home to only 11%.

• In 1999, only four countries (China, India, USA, Indonesia) topped the 200 million mark; but in 2050 there will be eight (India, China, USA, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh)

• Consider what languages will dominate. Mandarin Chinese is already the mother tongue of a sixth of the world’s people - nearly three times as many as English speakers.

An education for the current generation of students which is not multi-lingual, international, and global in its orientations must surely be unacceptable.

Section 2.

The post-industrial paradigm of an information-rich society

And that leads us to the second section. We are in a new period of history now, the post-industrial, information-rich age, and the future is no longer what it used to be (See, for example, Berman, 1981; Berry, 1988, Capra, 1983; Denning and Metcalfe, 1997; Drexler, 1986; Drucker, 1993; Dyson, 1981; Harman, 1988; Henderson, 1988; Kim and Dator, 1994; Miller, 1987; Ohmae, 1995a, 1995b; Wilber, 1983). A new pattern of educating is needed to accommodate to it.

Three decades ago, we could not have imagined that a time would come when every child would have access to a television set at home; when every child would be able to use a computer both at home and at school; when everyone would be contactable, wherever they are, by mobile telephone. Indeed, much of the societal concern about the levels of literacy in this generation of school-children arises from the fact that children do not read the way their parents did in the past, they do not physically write letters the way their parents did, they are image-dominated (through TV, video, and film) rather than literary (through writing and printed text), they communicate orally (through mobile phones and voice-mail) rather than through print. People sense that something revolutionary has happened to everyday survival skills. Consider some of the other facets of the revolution.

Access to information data bases:

When I was a young married teacher with three children in primary school, a salesman appeared at our door one afternoon trying to persuade me to purchase a twenty-five volume set of the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It would be very valuable for me as a teacher, I was told, and it came with a study-pack by means of which my children could study almost any topic under the sun by following a cross-referencing trail through the entries in this huge compendium of knowledge. We would have on call in our own home, the salesman said, a complete research library. Noone with a computer linked to Internet would consider buying a print version of the encyclopaedia now. It is available on a single CD-ROM, the equivalent of the twenty five volumes can be carried by a child as easily as a pencil, the text is regularly updated, and the disk gives international access to it. The consequences of just that one disk for a child’s learning program are profound. Furthermore, it is available at about an eighth of the cost of the print version.

The production of information is now exponential, and knowing how to access the data-bases has become a more important skill than the rote-learning of basic information. Indeed, very little has to learnt by heart. Information learnt like that can be inert. Rather, it is essential to be able to sift material, to test it for reliability, to synthesise it into meaningful chunks, to link it with other learnings, to apply and to extend it in other contexts, not least to solve problems or analyse issues. As one Professor in a medical faculty remarked to me, all that a doctor needs to learn (memorize) in five years at medical school could now be fitted onto one CD-ROM.

Video and film:

There has been an enormous increase in the amount of material in the print medium, especially as books; much of it is presented as charts, diagrams and photographs, but these are accompanied by linear text. Now, however, the amount of material (both documentary and story) available through video, television, and film presentation is astonishing. In some parts of the globe, a person can access more than a hundred TV channels, for example. It is possible to replay online, as often as one likes or needs to do so, significant demonstrations, lectures, talks and teaching episodes, and from around the world. These are visual and contextual presentations, of course, which use a whole-of-frame, image-based, presentational format quite different from that of linear text. Our daily news bulletins have became visual, international and dominantly electronic.

Virtual reality:

There is now a growing literature about virtual reality, virtual schools, and the virtual organization (Davidow and Malone, 1992; Hedberg et al; 1997; Lipnack and Stamps, 1994). These techniques and others using three-dimensional methodologies provide experiences which transcend the time and place where the observer is located, in formats described as virtual reality. The potential for in-school programs and individual learning is enormous.

The E-Book

Print materials like books are costly and heavy to carry about. Ask any academic who has collected documents from overseas; or any secondary school student who has to pack a haversack each day to carry her text-books to and from school. Just as all of those text-books can now be placed on one small disk or CD, so it is possible to buy the text of a book (such as a novel) on disk and to load it into a laptop computer. Better still, the text can be bought and downloaded into an e-book from which it can be read anywhere; further, since the screen is backlit, the text can be read without the need for external lighting. So one can go into the book store at an airport, buy a novel in digital form, download it into one’s e-book, and board one’s flight unencumbered by heavy print versions of inflight reading material. In effect, these are ‘go anywhere’ books.

Transportable computers:

The production of notebook computers and laptops has made possible the creation of a work-station anywhere, including a school-learning station. But the one machine has wider possibilities. PINS, one’s personal telephone (voice-mail) number, e-mail addresses, mobile phone, and fax machine can be combined into one machine. It will probably have a single, personalized, universal number; it will need no power outlet because its energy is transmitted by light (usually sunlight). It is likely also to combine (or be compatible with) the amenities of a smartcard (for accessing a line of credit with a bank, for tracking investment accounts, for transactions in lieu of cheques or credit cards) and to hold in its memory one’s driver’s licence and passport, all secure through a secret password. With this facility, a student can be on call, at call, or online from anywhere. She does not need to be anchored on school premises in order to pursue her official learning program.

Computers are as commonplace in the schooling of the future as paper, pens and pencils were in the conventional schooling of the Twentieth Century. Since they are enhanced by use in ‘smart buildings’, schools are likely to favour using rented plant which the owner agrees to adapt to the changing needs of the school as technology develops new capacities. It may be a liability for a school to be the owner of obsolescent buildings.

The wired or cabled city

Linking the world to home, office, and school by networked systems enormously expands the power and versatility of learning programs. IT links the home to an array of services delivered down-line where once they required physical delivery or a shopping excursion. The same facilities put academic and personal advice on tap twenty-four hours of the day, connect parent and school, allow e-mail and web-page communication, and provide a powerful network from which serendipitous extensions to schooling can develop.

Both print and digital skills:

None of the new information and learning technologies wipe out the need for a student to master print skills. It simply means that ‘literacy’ becomes a more expansive term, covering both print and digital skills. Every student will now acquire a greater range of skills, rather than one set substituting the need for the other.

None of this is new. It is not ‘the future’, but learning and information technology already existent and in use now. Furthermore, schools are already changing in order to be compatible with the new information-rich, wired, and interconnected society which is replacing the society based on an economy dependent on manufacturing and factory production

It is easy to demonstrate how the knowledge society has changed us:

• Firstly, children are quite at home with new technology; they have grown up with it, and know nothing else, picking up its implications and skills far more quickly than adults do.

• Secondly, the internet not only expands enormously knowledge production and information manipulation but it changes our perception of the world as well. It automatically internationalises us. So does television.

• Thirdly, the large, ponderous organizations inherited from previous decades are rapidly disappearing, displaced by small niche-driven enterprises radically different in shape and style of operation from those of the industrial society. They are small, resilient, well-connected, non-hierarchical, and strategy-driven. (Is that also a fair description of your school?)

• And fourthly, the people working in knowledge-based enterprises conceive of their careers on fundamentally different lines from those who grew up with an economy based on manufacturing. The new breed of workers know that leveraging knowledge is the essential quality which gives them competitive edge, achieves results and gives them employment, not long service to one company, nor loyalty to that company, to which they owe about as much allegiance as we give to our local delicatessen (Management Today, 1999: 10-11). (Does that also describe the attitude of your school’s teaching staff?)

How Schools Are Adapting

And schools are adapting, quickly. The following is a synthesis of what planners from across the globe have been advocating as the obvious things a school must do in order to be abreast of the Knowledge Revolution. They appear in documents like that of Education Victoria’s Learning Technologies in Victorian Schools 1998-2001.

(Concerning curriculum and learning)

• Computers are found in all classrooms and are used routinely and daily for learning projects, group work, written composition, and information access in all subject areas. Computers are a learning aid, not a subject. As Bill Gates observes, ‘Computer labs are a lousy place for computers’. The classroom uses computer graphics for oral and written presentations, and does some desk-top publishing of its own.

• Classrooms have been physically reconfigured to allow appropriate usage of the computers by teachers and students during lesson time. Part of the room space has been converted into learning alcoves and made suitable for group-based round-table sessions.

• The whole school and every classroom in it can connect to internet, the intranet, and can use e-mail.

• The school and its classrooms are connected to the whole community and especially its resources like libraries, museums, and government offices and their homepages. The school accesses some elements of its learning program from interstate or overseas.

• As well as books and other printed materials, the school’s library has extensive digital materials, including CD-ROMs.

• The school can supply the child’s entire textbooks for the year on CDs.

• The school is wired for large-scale instruction or demonstrations, and has ‘great lecture’ or ‘key lessons’ available online. As a result, the school can capitalise on its pedagogic range to enable some students to receive one-on-one instruction from a teacher, and to progress at their own rate.

• Consistent and comparable data on every student’s academic progress is collected by every teacher in every key learning area and routinely stored in the school’s information system or data-base. Every teacher can access that data-base at any time. The school regularly reports to its parents about the trendlines in this body of consolidated data.

• Some examinations and tests are conducted on and marked by computer. In consequence there is a growing tendency for students to take their tests when they are ready to do so.

(Concerning the operation of the school and its staff)

• There is a whole-of-school approach to management through computerization.

• The school has its finances, budgets and the student management system on a school-wide data base.

• The school uses computerization for internal communication and information-giving; in this respect it is in part a ‘paperless site’.

• There is a school-wide Information Technology plan. It includes a long-term program for updating software, for systematically replacing obsolete machines, for training and retraining of staff and students, for inducting new staff and students into the school’s technology resources, and for familiarizing parents with the school’s technology capacity and how they can make productive use of it.

• Every teacher has a computer, preferably a laptop whose software is compatible with the school’s.

• Every teacher has an e-mail address, provided through the school.

• Teachers network regularly with professional colleagues in-school and across schools.

• The school uses its website or homepage to keep parents informed with details about the school’s learning program, including what assignments, assessments, home study and projects have been set for their children.

• The school has its own site-based experts and peer support personnel available. In particular, it has a staff member (not necessarily a teacher) appointed to advise on information technology, including giving at-call technical advice on computers.

• Every teacher keeps up with developments in learning technologies through release-time to undertake professional development activity in IT.

Section 3.

About the future’s schools:

And that brings us naturally to Section Three. If we already know these things both about the new society we have moved into and also about the way schooling is adapting to meet the enhanced conditions in that society, then education has to break itself out of the constrictive ideas which were inherited from the industrially-based society and which belong there. The new formats, when applied to education, schools, and schooling, produce some new ground-rules. Let us note a few of them (Beare, 1999).

Six propositions about the nature of schooling:

1. Schooling is released from physical imprisonment on a campus.

We have found that new learning technology releases a student from physical attendance at a place called school, it releases her from sole reliance on textbooks and printed materials, it requires of her literacy in digital as well as print materials, it affords her access to an awesome array of people, places, and databases, and it changes the role of the teacher-as-purveyor-of-knowledge. It makes possible an extended range of learning media and styles, and puts on stream vicarious experiences like virtual reality. It enhances learning through imagery as well as words. It puts new emphasis on skill development and knowledge production.

And it is global. Internet is what the word implies; it is an international network. Regardless of what the school and its teachers may want or plan, when students join the international highway of knowledge transmission, their curriculum is automatically internationalised. The consequences may not be entirely desirable, but they are inevitable. Further, students are able to find information which their teachers do not know about, a situation which alters the teacher role from that of expert and authority to that of mentor, adviser, learning strategist, and wise friend. Further, all of the above tends to reconstruct the nature of knowledge itself.

2. Schooling is a process.

So schooling can now be seen for what it really is, a systematic learning process provided for young people between the ages of five and eighteen, or from Kindergarten to Year 12 (‘K through 12’). It is made compulsory when society cannot function effectively unless everyone in it has been through the process and acquired some fundamental competencies and knowledge, and also when a person can be a fully functioning, responsible, and contributing citizen only if he or she has undertaken the process.

3. Schools, then, are simply providers of the schooling process.

The schools may not be the only providers, of course, and other effective and legitimate ways of making the schooling process available to users are coming into existence. Thus school and schooling are not synonymous terms.

It makes us aware that we can no longer equate ‘schools’ with ‘school buildings’. The premises out of which schools generate or make available to users their learning programs (which are part of the schooling process) can vary enormously, and probably should. The process is not dependent on a stereotyped set of physical facilities. A lot of education and schooling can be, and already is, provided out of rented or ‘found’ space, and developments in information technology will widen the possibility, and probably diversify the places where formal learning can be undertaken. It will become progressively unlikely that formal schooling can be confined to a single, fenced-in property.

4. Schools are not only providers but are also brokers of educational services.

Schools will tend to be seen as agents for the persons who enrol with them, putting together components supplied by themselves or by other providers to meet the client learner’s requirements. Schools are no longer merely ‘places of learning’. They are the articulators of learning, the professional agencies who make the schooling process accessible and systematic.

5. Every service, including an essential service, and including being a provider and being a broker, has to be paid for.

When schooling begins to differentiate in these kinds of ways, it becomes obvious that there is a cost for every service or amenity, and it has to paid for in some way and at an appropriate level. At the least, the payment has to recoup the costs involved. The payment may have to be made by the user (when a purely personal gain results from the service), or by the community (through tax dollars) where the process is essential or compulsory. When the benefits are both personal and communal, then a mixed payment is appropriate which shares the provision costs. The basic premise is that education is never ‘free’, and that someone has to meet the costs of providing it (Ross and Levacic, 1999). Education is and has always been a marketable commodity in this sense.

6. The term ‘teacher’ will undergo re-definition as the teaching service professionalises.

In the school’s roles as both providers and brokers for educational services, the educators are certain to take on different roles and specializations, principally by the disaggregation of what teachers do and by the development of functions which require more than a one-best-way, systematic transmission of knowledge (Marles, 1992; Hargreaves, 1994; Beare, 1998).

In the past, teachers have been hired both to manage the process of schooling and to provide educational services. They have tended to work from a school base, and they have been paid standardized, award-based salaries. There are no compelling reasons why the stereotype of a teacher should involve the same work patterns for them all, why their appointments ought to be full-time (the term is losing its meaning anyway), why they should be attached to only one school, why their working day should be a standard 8 am-to- 5 pm in a Monday-to-Friday five-day week, or why their school duties should be a standard collage which every teacher is expected to discharge (Ransome, 1996; Green, 1998)

As the field professionalises, some teachers will prefer to negotiate individual packages of functions each of which will attract a fee-for-service rather than a ‘salary’. Some teachers will form companies which will operate like (and will probably be called) a standard school, and which they will own. Some citizens or societal groups (such as religious groups or coalitions of parents) will form companies or enterprises which also operate like (and are called) a school and which will hire teachers or educators to discharge its functions. Governments may also form such enterprises to run like schools.

Some teachers will choose to be employed on a salary, as is the case now. Some will negotiate contracts to provide teaching and other educational services on a fee-for-service basis. Some will operate like normal ‘classroom teachers’, but many will choose not to. Schools will hire other personnel to carry out roles which teachers may not wish to undertake or which do not require a person with a teacher’s expertise or qualifications. And some teachers - usually the highly able and confident ones - will freelance to provide expert services, either to individual learners or to other providers (such as schools), by selling their advice and expertise in areas like curriculum, assessment, pedagogical techniques and new knowledge. In short, the modes of service delivery in education are diversifying.

This discussion and the six ground-rules bring us to two critical and key areas of schooling which will have to be reconsidered and perhaps reconstructed. One is the way the school is organized; and the second is the way the curriculum is conceived of and provided.

Post-modern management for schools

The schooling process is sure to be carried out within new management structures for schools modelled upon the knowledge-based corporations which are characteristic of the post-industrial conditions. They will look like the flexible conglomerate which keeps central control of only the essential and strategic areas but which allows entrepreneurial freedom to the operating units which make up the body corporate. Schools have always copied the best management models extant in the wider community and it will be no different in the Knowledge Society.

Centralized controls; standardized provisions; equality of access to public services; homogenized quality; awards and regulations which impose conformity and consistency - these have been superseded. The obsolescent organization was based on control - hierarchy; on bigness and standardization; on topdown, centralized command-structures; and on old-style supervision.

Post-industrial organizations are radically different from those of the industrial society (Calas and Smircich, 1997; Handy, 1996; Hedberg et al, 1997; Koch, 1998; Reich, 1992; Sadtler et al, 1997; Senge, 1990; Townsend et al, 1999). The post-industrial economy has spawned new forms of organization, like those firms which are flexible, which can make quick, strategic decisions, which encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, which value creativity rather than conformity, which give their members the power to take local decisions and to exercise initiative, and which regard the people in the organization as partners rather than as property.

The kind of organization which has emerged has been described as a network organization (it is an appropriate metaphor). It has a centre or core which retains ‘tight control over technical quality, research and development, major investment decisions, planning, training, and coordinative activities’ and which becomes ‘the intelligence centre of a large constellation of companies and organizations’. Thus there is a relatively small, lean, headquarters staff, a core. Indeed, the corporation need employ only a core staff, smaller in number, more highly qualified, and more synoptic in its roles than the management staff used to be, a group ‘whose essential product is leadership’ (Toffler, 1985: 129).

The rest of the firm's activities are conceived of as separable functions. They are defined into modules, and then contracted or franchised out to satellite units or subsidiary firms who supply services or components to the mother company, and usually for a negotiated fee. It therefore operates through a spider web of interconnecting, relatively autonomous, contractual units which deliver goods or services when they are needed, ‘just in time’. It is not necessary for the modular operations to be performed by or within the firm, nor is it necessary for the firm to own all the subsidiaries which handle the modules. Some of them can be mini-firms, some operate as ‘firms within the firm’, and others as independent entities. The head office or core does not need to concern itself with the internal workings of the subsidiary nor to dabble in its work methods, or even to own it, provided the service is carried out to the satisfaction of the parent company. Some of the company's best executives may form ‘spin-off companies’ with venture capital from the parent company and a contract to provide a guaranteed service for a price.

This is the configuration we can expect to find in schools. Indeed, it is already evident in large schools and universities, and in particular in those schools which operate on several campuses or as mini-systems. It is not unusual to find some of the components located off-shore. It is also evident in the way the role of Principal is now being defined.

The curriculum for a knowledge-based society:

We have known about the pressure to remodel the curriculum at least since books like those of Seymour Papert and James Martin’s The Telematic Society (1981) and The Great Transition (1996) appeared. Many things about the way schools teach and what they teach are due for remodelling (Gardner, 1999). Consider the following, for example.

• It is only partly correct to associate certain learnings with certain ages. We need to determine which learnings they are, and then for the rest of the time free the curriculum of unnecessary or artificial straitjacketing. When the learning program for children and adolescents is fed by technology, it involves a lot of spontaneous search, and is partly serendipitous, yet at the end it must still be systematic, coherent, and cover key areas which all young learners should be introduced to or become proficient in.

• The linear curriculum with its apparent one-best-way approach which sequences ‘knowledge’ into step-by-step gradations will be overtaken by a curriculum which is nodular (that is, consisting of chunks of learning, the various components of which will have to unpacked, probably with the help of a teacher or tutor ) and modular (that is, packages of intense learning which are like building blocks and which the student pastes together to form a coherent education).

• Some parcelling of human knowledge into predetermined ‘subjects’ or ‘disciplines’ will occur if only to conserve the time and energy of the learners, but overlaps and interconnections will become regular through Information Technology, and the subjects themselves will become hybridised. Students are capable of travelling by several paths through material, often handling complex matter before the simple emerges.

• The educator staff will perforce work together in teams, and call in persons (like computer engineers) with different skills from the ones they as teachers possess. So the educational staff will become more mixed, containing many adults whose skills and expertise complement those of the ‘teacher’.

• Because of extensive computerization, international access, the need for time flexibility and for after-hours access to equipment like computers, the school-day will have to be reworked. Any good educational facility, especially one housing sophisticated equipment and amenities, ought to be available on a round-the-clock basis, certainly after school and into the evening, and again early in the morning. It should not be closed up for extended holiday periods either, except for maintenance purposes. More staff are needed for an extended day, and most of them would work in shifts.

• The assumption that learning takes place in a geographically bound space called school and classroom, and that the student must graze for most of his or her ‘learning time’ within that fenced paddock is disappearing. Learning can take place anywhere, and frequently off-campus or in a place not normally defined as a school, especially with computer access and with portable computers (laptops and notebooks). Education will function through an interconnected web of learning sites and resource people.

The metaphors of networks and student-as-knowledge-worker.

If we view schools as the brokers for learning on behalf of their students, they will seek out and then buy, hire or lease the best modules of learning available. The curriculum will dwell on skills rather than on content, and emphasise the progressive deepening of skill in identifying and analysing a problem or issue, in devising ways to solve or handle the problem, and then in the application of the findings both to this problem and in other areas of knowledge and skill.

The problems and issues considered in the curriculum are increasingly borderless and transnational, for this is an information-rich society and accessing the sources both of the storage and the generation of knowledge is not only possible but relatively easy and routine. Thus what is to be ‘learnt by heart’ in the curriculum will shrink to a core of knowings essential to negotiating one’s way around the global community of knowledge; it has been called ‘scaffolding knowledge’. Learning how and where to access knowledge and how to handle it may be a more productive use of a learner’s time than committing a great number of facts to memory. There will be high emphasis in the curriculum on learning how as much as on learning what, on understanding underlying principles more than on committing information to memory, on working jointly with others in a team on problem-solving as much on individual learning.

This last characteristic highlights an important development. Conventional schooling has been built around the individual as a comparatively isolated learner. Each student is given learning assignments, she is assessed and given individual marks, her individual progress is monitored, and she is promoted or graduated on her own performances. Borrowing the work of another is considered cheating. Indeed, a fellow student is in many respects considered a competitor whom the student must endeavour to outperform. But learning team skills and how both to rely upon and to use the contributions of others are now essential skills to be acquired through schooling programs. So how does the educator award ‘marks’ for joint achievement, for joint performance, for a team effort?

The new generation of students will understand quickly that learning is neither linear nor even. It comes in intensive chunks. There can be a long lead-up in which material is gleaned and assembled, there can be periods of white heat while the gathered material is internalised, massaged, combined and brought to a focus, and there can often be a plateau for systematic and painstaking application to details. Schools must be geared up to handle the peaks and troughs of the student’s learning path.

Students, then, are virtual knowledge workers. ‘Class-work’ and ‘school assignments’ will less and less resemble factory jobs - a regular set of work, regular time in class or as a class, regular hours of the day committed to a subject, and a fixed place in which the work is done. The biggest propellant out of that mindset is the networked society. The segments of the learning program are likely to be differently organized, managed, accessed and assessed, and then used. Students will put the same number of working hours into their schooling, but in intensive chunks of time interspersed with lean time as the work-flows dictate (Handy, 1989: ch. 4). They will see themselves as acquiring expert skills in a networked curriculum applied through effective learning teams and alliances. Their learnings may not be acquired through one particular ‘school’. Indeed, they will see their home school as the facilitating base which enables them to access the learnings appropriate to them at their stage of development. The best home-schools will be the networked and connected ones.

As a result, students, like knowledge workers elsewhere, will take a different view about their study programs. They will think of themselves as pursuing a set of assignments and projects individually tailored to fit their own learning interests and needs and pitched at an appropriate level of sophistication. These students will understand that to be successful (and employed), they must remain learners for the whole of their lives, always reading, always questioning, always intermeshing work and learning.

The student as knowledge worker will understand, too, that she - not the school, nor the teacher -is responsible for her own learning career, and for her progress. She knows that she will be judged on learning outcomes; and graduation or promotion will be dependent on whether she is able to bring forward detailed evidence about her levels of performance, and whether they conform with the best standards being achieved elsewhere in the country and the world. The student will know, at least in the later stages of her schooling, that education is international, and that many of her educational programs and services could be generated or come from offshore.

The assessments, certificates and credentials which result from the process of schooling are awarded on the strength of what one can do, not on age. ‘Tests’ are demonstrations by the student that he or she has learnt something.

These developments do not seem startling to those schools which have already confronted the future and planned their routes ahead. To them these patterns are not futuristic; they are already being adopted. Nor are the developments iconoclastic, for teachers are practical idealists; they do not throw away what is valuable to make room for the untried and speculative. Teachers and educators around the world have their own maps of the learning terrain, in the form of syllabuses, core curricula or essential knowings, curriculum frameworks, the skills and knowledge expected of the normal child at specified stages of his or her growth. They carry with them a grid or matrix with subjects to be covered (or ‘key learning areas’, what I have called scaffolding knowledge and skill) on one axis and expected level of year-by-year attainments (skills and knowledge) on the other axis. As part of their professional craft, teachers can place every student in their care within that matrix, and identify what they have learned and where gaps exist.

What will become standard, then, is this. Educators as a group will find themselves responsible for mentoring a group of learners, directing them sequentially into projects or modules of activities, and keeping track of progress and outcomes. It is obvious that a project about volcanoes, for example, can simultaneously result in deepening reading skills, learning some physics or mathematics, and acquiring some knowledge about geography and geology. It is probably silly, if not impossible, to label such a project Language or Science, Maths or Geography. It will fall to the educator-mentors, together with the student or students involved, to assess at the end what skills have been acquired and what contributions have been made to the scaffolding on which the whole learning regimen rests. It requires professional skill to make summative assessments like this, but it is after all part of the learning technologies landscape which a professional educator knows about.

It will produce some brilliant learning in the hands of emancipated tutors, as was the case when in the 1870s Oxford’s Professor of Art, John Ruskin, took his students physically out of doors to repair roads. It may have started as an exercise in the practical application of Art, but imagine the provocative questions evoked: What causes a pothole anyway? Can we predict where the next one will occur and what shape it will have? Why is this road potholed whereas the next one over is not? Why has this road been allowed to deteriorate whereas another was preferentially repaired? Can the repairs be made in ways which are at one and the same time effectively useful, environmentally friendly and aesthetically pleasing? Who pays for the aesthetics, and do they cost more (or less) than a merely functional repair? This kind of learning has been called by my colleague Peter Hill a ’thinking curriculum’.

If, then, you were presented with a greenfields site on which a new town or suburb was to be built, what schools, educational buildings, or schooling processes would you construct, and what rationale for education would you offer? It is likely you would plan an interconnecting system, not a set of isolated, stand-alone enterprises. Information technology is likely to explode the notions of ‘school’, ‘learning’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘curriculum’ as we have come to know them. In fact, the aspects of contemporary schooling anchored to concepts which belong with cottage industries (the pre-industrial society) or which derive from an economy heavily dependent on mass production, mass employment and standardization (the industrial society) dated, obsolescent and due to be discarded. Who would want to subject tomorrow’s citizens to a dysfunctional program like that?

Section 4.

Imagination, and the Power of Design & Technology

The Ruskin example leads us into the final section. The best breakthroughs - in education no less than in other areas - are born of imagination which is informed by skill, by disciplined investigation, and by applying theoretical understandings. It needs a method which allows the inventor to disconnect an essential idea from being imprisoned within learned convention. The breakouts occur through someone who can think outside the lines. It requires imagination, yes, but it also assumes that in the first instance the innovator knows where the lines are.

These skills, believe it or not, are endemic to Art, Design, and Technology (by which we mean the comprehension of why a technique works). In ‘designing tomorrow today’, then, especially in terms of Technology Education, it is useful to go back to a period in recent history where a similar change of worldview took place, where a similar transition was occurring. Who made the breakthroughs then, and how did they arrive at those breakthroughs?

Deep-seated changes tend to gather momentum both by chance and by a sort of silent osmosis, and then they acquire widespread acceptance; and an apparently sudden, collective and conceptual leap occurs, like the idea whose time has come, a new mindset takes holds across the world. To conclude, consider three examples of how a break-out like this occurs.

1. Antarctic exploration and emancipation from conventional wisdom:

The data about Antarctic exploration are now being revisited, and some interesting facets of why expeditions succeeded or failed have come to light. Captain Robert Falcon Scott, ‘Scott of the Antarctic’, made his first (and unsuccessful) assault to reach the South Pole with the ship Discovery in 1901. He was only 33 at the time. It was conducted like an expedition of discovery, like many of the romantic explorations of the 1800s, like those of Livingstone and Stanley in so-called darkest Africa, an act of Empire carried out in conformity with all the traditions of the British Navy; from which all of Scott’s men (except Shackleton alone) were drawn..

Shackleton might well have beaten both Amundsen and Scott to the South Pole in 1907-1908 (three of his team were the first human beings to reach the Magnetic South Pole) had it not been for the British gamesmanship which led Scott to forbid Shackleton from using his abandoned base camp in McMurdo Sound, established by Scott in 1901 (Ayres, 1999). Shackleton out of sheer survival was forced to use it anyway, a move which brought vitriolic comment from Scott who called it a ‘breach of faith’ and said that Shackleton had ‘deliberately adopted the part of plausible rogue and to have thrown scruples to the wind’ (Mortimer, 1999: 45-6). He was behaving as though it was a game of cricket, not a matter of life and death.

For Scott’s 1911-12 expedition, successful although all his Polar team lost their lives, Scott was advised by the famous Norwegian Arctic explorer Nansen to use huskies (dogs) to pull the sleds. The advice was ignored. It was not convention. Instead, Scott carried south on his ship ponies, not dogs, to pull the sleds. Horses were so hopeless in the conditions that Scott’s men ended up manhandling the sleds and equipment themselves, which Scott put down to evidence of their ‘manliness’. Scott also thought it was inhumane to slaughter for food the horses or dogs which were helping them. So when the horses proved slow and useless in the deep snow, he sent them back to base. Had he killed them and stowed the meat, his team might have had the food to weather out the blizzard which ultimately killed them. All but one of the ponies died on the return journey to base-camp anyway!

The Norwegian Amundsen, on the other hand, had recruited for his team men who could use skis, and he also used a dog team. Halfway to the Pole, Amundsen shot half of his dogs and stored the meat, made the trip to the Pole travelling light and quickly, renewed his polar team’s energy on the return journey with the stored food cache, and surprised even his colleagues by arriving back at base camp early, on January 26 1912. Meanwhile, Scott and his party struggled on to the Pole, arrived to discover that Amundsen had beaten them to it, and then died on their return journey on 29 March, two months later. Amundsen said of his trip, ‘The whole thing went like a dream’ (Mortimer, 1999: 72, 82).

Seen now in retrospect, the English explorers failed to think outside conventional frameworks, working in a Victorian and not a Twentieth Century mind-frame. They lost both the race and their own lives in the process.

2. Hybridisation and new subject disciplines.

The turn of the Twentieth Century saw the emergence of the new field of learning called psychology. One of the early pioneers, William James, studied medicine at Harvard, concentrated on physiology, became an professor of philosophy in 1885 which was changed to psychology in 1889. He applied to thought processes the disciplines of medicine, philosophy and the scientific analysis of data, as are demonstrated in his famous book famous book Varieties of Religious Experience (1901). Another early pioneer, Sigmund Freud, was a medical doctor, who through curiosity combined the use of hypnosis with medicine, for which he was roundly ridiculed The same can be said about Carl Jung, a Swiss medical researcher who used Galton’s psychometric method of word-association to analyse personality types, and then cross-fertilized the new field by calling on disciplines like anthropology, mythology, and religion. Put simply, these men refused to be type-cast or pigeon-holed by subject boundaries.

The same kinds of lateral thinking have more recently produced the new fields of biotechnology (which combines the skills of biology with those of engineering), nanotechnology and gene technology.

When the Republic of Ireland gained admission to the European Common Market about two decades ago, it found itself in cut-throat competition in the areas upon which it had traditionally depended for its economic survival - largely agricultural or farm products like potatoes and turnips. Something radical was needed to save the nation’s economy and to change its national operating base. The Irish government therefore began to pour money into education, particularly those facets of higher education which would produce an educated, employable, strategically competent workforce with new combinations of skill.

So it created not universities but vocationally oriented Institutes of Higher Education (IHEs) which explored the possibility of new degrees and subject mixes through hybridisation. It also gave tax breaks to international companies which wanted to set up a European office to capitalize on the new market opportunities on the continent. One IHE degree, for example, provided a new degree with a major in Business and a second major in a foreign language; requiring that one year of the degree be taken at a continental university. The result was that these Irish graduates were enormously attractive to international companies for they could speak the language of business in a European vernacular. Not surprisingly, the south of Ireland became a much-sought-after location for international companies to use for their European offices.

3. The marriage of skill and theory: The case of the Bauhaus movement

For our third and final example, the Bauhaus movement from 1919 shows brilliantly how fundamental and imaginative change grew from fusing the fields of Art, Architecture, Craft, and Technology, producing one of the most significant revolutions of the Twentieth Century (Whitford, 1984).

The architect Walter Gropius established the first Bauhaus College in the German city of Weimar in 1919 by merging the practical, vocational School of Arts and Trades with the more traditional, academic School of Plastic Arts. In his Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919, Gropius coined the word Bauhaus by inverting the terms Building (a theoretical field) and Construction (a craft area) and forming the field ‘construction building’ (bau-haus, ‘house of building’). Gropius argued that the traditional distinctions between artists and artisans, between those who think and those who do, between those who theorize and those who apply the theory, between art and utility are false. All of his students needed both sets of skills. Noone should be admitted to a Fine Arts field, including building, architecture and Design, without first having mastered a trade and learning how things work. He aimed to create a new union of fine arts and applied arts, and a new architecture which created a living environment. He hoped that good design would be found in every aspect of modern daily living and in everything we use. The chief characteristic of the Bauhaus movement, then, was ‘elegant geometric style carried out with great economy of means’. Modern Architecture was born.

For his college Gropius recruited a collection of the world’s most eminent artists. In 1921, the celebrated 42-year-old painter and stained glass expert Paul Klee joined Lyonel Feininger (graphic arts), Johannes Itten (the Swiss painter and sculptor) and Gropius as a Bauhaus Professors. Klee taught the ‘grammar of forms’. In the next year, 1922, Wassili Kandinsky (wall painting), Vice-President and founder of the Academy of Arts and 22 provincial museums, left Russia - where he had fallen out of sympathy with the bleakness of the Marxist regime - to join Gropius’ staff at Weimar. Oscar Schlemmer (stagecraft), Marcel Breuer (interior design and architecture), Herbert Bayer (typography), Gerhard Marcks (pottery), Georg Muche (weaving), and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (photography) all served on faculty. It is of interest that between 1915 and 1919, Gropius was married to the widow of the celebrated Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, music and architecture united one roof, as it were.

The technologically innovative Bauhaus movement between the two world wars transformed modern architecture and a host of other things besides because a handful of creative individuals or teams imaginatively linked what was until then kept separate by taken-for-granted assumptions. They released a burst of imaginative, dynamic synergy which broke conventional boundaries, and tied several diverse innovations together for the first time into a cohesive vision which was greater than the sum of its parts.

The city of Weimar became uneasy with hosting a school universally described as revolutionary. So in 1925, the Bauhaus moved to its own quarters in Dessau, physically designed and built by Gropius, three hours by train from Berlin, with a population of 70,000 largely employed in mechanical, chemical and aeronautical industries. By 1928, the Bauhaus was a powerful movement. Gropius signed a contract to build several hundred housing units in the suburb of Torten, thereby guaranteeing an income for the institute but also putting its theory-into-practice into a working-model project.

All of this was labelled decadent and subversive by the Nazis who came to power in 1933. Hitler saw Gropius’ school as a left-wing protest against right-wing conservatism. The Nazi administration replaced 25 of Germany’s best museum directors with state appointees, and forced the closure of the Bauhaus. The Nazis action merely spread the Bauhaus movement to the world and widened its impact. The same action forced Albert Einstein to flee Germany in 1933 when the regime withdrew his citizenship because he was a Jew; he settled in Princeton in USA. He had discovered his Theory of Relativity at the age of 26 in 1905. The following are examples of the world-wide impact of the Bauhaus.

• Gropius fled to England via Italy in 1934, and in 1937 became the distinguished Professor of Architecture at Harvard, a position he held until 1952.

• The Bauhaus teacher and painter Josef Albers, for example, established after 1940 on the shore of Eden Lake in North Carolina the remarkable Black Mountain College, which was literally built by the professors and their students, which was described as ‘the spiritual heir of the Bauhaus’, and which used in its courses people like Henry Miller (the playwright), writer Anais Nin, Albert Einstein, and the composer John Cage. In 1948 Buckminster Fuller first tried to erect a geodesic dome on the campus of Black Mountain College. Albers later went on to direct the art school at Yale.

• The Bauhaus followers saw the advantage in allying creative designers with machine production, using mass production’s own materials in their creations. So in constructing chairs and furniture, they discarded conventional carpentry and developed ‘modern furniture’, factory-produced, with clean lines, using steel, metal, and canvas fabrics.

• They pioneered the prefabrication of component parts of buildings and the assembling of the structure on site. So they developed prefabricated housing, like Jean Prouve’s 1944-45 minimalist housing in Lorraine, France, which made for rapid rehabilitation after the Second World War. Prouve was a wrought-iron artist who had trained, Bauhaus-style, as an architect, craftsman, and engineer. Gropius himself acted as Vice-President of General Panel Corporation until 1952.

• Their buildings established Modern Architecture; they were parsimonious in design, geometrical, and capitalised upon the generic characteristics of the component materials - hence their buildings at the Fagus Works in Germany, Gropius’ Cologne high-rises, Mies van der Rohe’s famous 1958 Seagram Building in New York or the Pirelli Tower in Milan. One of the most arresting design’s was Gropius’ thoroughly functional and imaginative school design for Henry Morris’ Village College at Impington in Cambridgeshire (1936).

If ever there was a demonstration of how art, imagination, and design can influence the world, this was it. Like Christopher Wren’s legacy, their memorials are all around us - the modern, functional, designed and living environment of home and city.

Conclusion

These, then, are the ways in which new ideas, new mind-sets, new world-views arrive and become accepted. The new structures, new techniques, new ways of looking at things, new processes, new thinking, new behaviours are all opposed at first, considered radical or threatening or ridiculous. But the perceptive notice and capitalise. The blinkered and the blindly conventional are left to wonder what has happened to the world, and why the old methods no longer seem to work anymore.

Take note, then. You are on the cusp of a new world in the making. You can design tomorrow today. Richard Slaughter’s paper this afternoon will show how to use the principles of foresight to make over the present into a desired and constructive future. In the meantime, look up, and look around. Don’t wait for the future to happen. You’re already standing in it!

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