Education and Tomorrow's World (For International Education Year)

Extract

We live in a world that is changing before our very eyes—a world in which the population explosion, decolonization and the profound economic and social transformations resulting from technological development are so many forces making for the democratization of education. At the same time the acceleration of scientific progress is resulting in the more and more rapid obsolescence of knowledge, and the development of mass communication techniques and audio-visual methods is revolutionizing the traditional bases of communication. With all this it is out of the question for education to be confined, as in the past, to training the leaders of tomorrow's society in accordance with some predetermined scheme of structures, needs and ideas, or to preparing the young, once and for all, for a given type of existence. Education is no longer the privilege of an elite or the concomitant of a particular age; to an increasing extent, it is reaching out to embrace the whole of society and the entire life-span of the individual. This means that it must be continuous and omnipresent.