New methods for a new world.

• Author: Anderson, Loren J.

Since tomorrow's successful organizations certainly will be different from what today's generation has known, the U.S. can not afford to rely on old educational methods to prepare for the 21st century.

Those in leadership roles within education today are products of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Their initial value systems and understandings were shaped by a Cold War, pre-computer, pre-space flight, Eurocentric world in which the emergence of television firmly established "Father Knows Best" and "Ozzie and Harriet" as the dominant and preferred family model.

Now, they work each day to educate a post-1970s generation for whom Vietnam, Watergate, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., are the subjects of history. The Cold War era has been redefined, computers and space are everyday currency, national boundaries increasingly are gateways, and an entire new range of social issues confronts an increasingly diverse population.

Educators' struggle comes into focus most clearly as people consider the future. "Traditional" first-year college students, generally aged 18 and 19, will be 25 years old when the 21st century begins. They will live most of their so-called productive years and all of their increasing number of retirement years in the next century, facing new issues, confronting new problems, discovering new possibilities, and pursuing careers not yet invented.

How shall educators prepare them? How can the products of the mid century working at century's end best educate for a new century, for a new world, and for a new era?

These questions lead to a natural interest in the future, explained very clearly by teacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe just days before the Challenger disaster, when she said, "I touch the future every day, for I am a teacher."

One view of the 21st-century world begins with the increasing pace of technological advancements and their impact on our daily lives. Consider the following examples:

* Researchers from the National Science Foundation's earthquake mitigation project are working on so-called "smart buildings" that, through a sensor network, actively would respond to seismic vibration. When an earthquake occurs, the sensors will transfer the information to a central computer that analyzes the data and, within one one-hundredth of a second, program the building to respond. The shaking would be suppressed before human beings ever feel it.

* Automobile engineers are at work on a new generation of communication...