1.  A NEW SOCIAL CONTEXT FOR EDUCATION
        
               Until the first quarter of the 20th century, the time-span
        of major cultural change was greater than the life span of the
        average individual.  Under these conditions it was appropriate to
        define education as a process of transmittal of what was known,
        or the transmitting of the culture.  It was also appropriate to
        define the role of the teacher as that of the "transmitter of
        information" and to regard education as a process primarily for
        youth.  
        
               Alfred N.  Whitehead (1931) pointed out in a commencement
        address at Harvard University in 1930 that, "We are living in the
        first period of human history for which this assumption is
        false...today, this time span is considerably shorter than that
        of human life, and accordingly our training must prepare
        individuals to face a novelty of conditions."  As the time-span
        of major cultural change becomes shorter than the life-span of
        the individual, it becomes necessary to redefine education as a
        process of continuing inquiry.  Whitehead suggested the role of
        the teacher must shift from that of the transmitter of
        information to facilitator of self-directed inquiry, and to
        regard education as a lifelong process.  He predicted that
        knowledge gained at any point of time will become increasingly
        obsolete over the course of the next few decades (p.viii-xix).
        
               Given that the world was focused on The Great Depression,
        America's educational establishment did not respond to
        Whitehead's position.  Two generations after Whitehead's address,
        the educational systems around the world remained largely
        unchanged.  They were still tied to the subject-matter
        transmittal framework characteristic of the industrial age. 
        Rapidly approaching was an entirely new wave of civilization that
        individuals, communities and nations were hardly prepared to
        encounter.
        
               Psychologists, educators, and social analysts  like Saul
        Alinsky, Jerome Bruner, Paul Goodman, John Holt, Sidney Jourard,
        Carl Rogers, Charles Silberman, Jean Piaget, Margaret Mead and
        Alvin Toffler attempted to raise the consciousness of educators
        worldwide in an attempt to prepare them for the changes taking
        place.  They maintained that schools were out of touch with
        both human nature and the changing world.  One of the crucial new
        realities they promoted was that education must be lifelong if
        the individual hoped to avoid the catastrophe of human
        obsolescence.
        
               While the median age in the United States in 1900 was 16
        years, in 1960 it was 31 years.  This trend has continued to
        climb, and it has been predicted by the turn of the century the
        median age will be close to 40 years.  Another fact of equal or
        greater importance was that, on average, women in North America
        ceased bearing children after age thirty, with a half-century of
        productive life ahead of them.  Yet most government officials and
        manufacturers, educators, advertisers and publishers failed to
        realize or act upon these facts.  The Psychology of Aging by J.E.
        
               Birren and other such books had been purchased, and
        perhaps read, but educators, politicians, and social scientists,
        those making decisions about society, did not act upon the clear
        implications presented in them.  Yet all the people who made up
        these statistics were already born.  Kidd (1973) asked, "If adult
        educators fail to count noses and face the facts, who will?" (p. 
        8).  Given the rapidly changing condition of the society and the
        increasing "graying" of America, the need for a comprehensive
        review of education, and especially, adult education, seemed
        to be in order.  The struggle to raise the consciousness of
        educators in America and elsewhere remained a difficult task.  
        
               One of the most decisive contradictions to outworn notions
        about the adult's capacity to learn came with the publishing of
        E.L.  Thorndike's book, Adult Learning in 1928.  Thorndike's
        findings were that, in general, nobody under forty-five should
        restrain himself from trying to learn anything because of a
        belief or fear that he is too old to be able to learn it.  Nor
        should he use that fear as an excuse for not learning anything
        which he ought to learn.  If he fails in learning it, inability
        due directly to age will very rarely, if ever, be the reason. 
        Adult education suffers no mystical handicap because of the age
        of the students.
        
               Thorndike's figures were accurate for the time, but
        continued research into the adults' ability to learn indicate
        that the average adult learns throughout h/er lifespan with only
        some loss due mainly to visual and auditory acuity (Kidd, 1973).
        
               By the late 1940's the cultural changes these men
        predicted flowed throughout the world like cataclysmic waves, and
        whole societies began floundering under their powerful
        influences.  To meet them, it would become necessary for all
        human beings to accept revolutionary new ideas regarding
        learning, adaptation, the education of children, and especially,
        adults.
        
               In their estimation, the changes these analysts advocated
        needed immediate attention.  But what were the changes taking
        place in the civilization which were demanding radical strategies
        for meeting the evolving world civilizations?   What kinds of
        adaptations were needed?   How would these changes impact on the
        process of child and adult education?  
        
               To answer these questions is the primary goal of this
        book.  The psychology of adult learning is founded in the context
        of the transition from an industrial to an information society. 
        The implications regarding this transition are universal and
        socially complex.  The secondary goal of this book is to explore
        the changing nature of society, how humans need to adapt to these
        changes, and especially how adult education can contribute to the
        successful adaptation to them.  Given the nature of education at
        the midpoint of the century, significant work needed to be done
        to make education more appropriate for the exponential changes
        taking place in the society.  The third goal is to encourage a
        new view of learning which will take place from "cradle to
        grave", or what will be described throughout as Lifelong
        learning (LLL).
        
               In his book, Future Shock, Alvin Toffler (1970)
        effectively defined the changes taking place in Western
        civilizations.
        
               Between 1965-1970, Toffler (1970) interviewed hundreds of
        people from hippies to research specialists in an attempt to
        understand the effect of "Future Shock", the exponential rate of
        change affecting first world societies.  He discovered first,
        that future shock "is not a distantly potential danger, but a
        real sickness that an increasingly large number of people already
        were suffering from without any real hope of rectifying." 
        Secondly, he became appalled by how little people actually knew
        about adaptivity.  He wrote that "earnest intellectuals talk
        bravely about educating for change or 'preparing for
        the future', but few know virtually anything about how to do it
        (p.4).
        
             Future Shock was the "dizzying disorientation brought on by
        the premature arrival of the future; a time phenomenon brought on
        by the greatly accelerating rate of change in society" (p.13).
        
               Kidd (1973) supported Toffler's argument by writing that
        it was a cliche to talk about social change, because "we have all
        been borne or dragged along in an avalanche of change,
        exhilarated or frightened or numbed by what has been happening to
        us.  The feelings of many are best illustrated by the title
        of the best-selling book, Future Shock.  It is difficult to be
        observant about the force and direction of a hurricane when one
        is in the 'eye' of it" (p.8).
        
               Toffler cited Kenneth Boulding (1966), an eminent
        economist and social thinker, who wrote that the present moment
        represents a crucial turning point in human history.  He observed
        that "as far as many series related to activities of mankind are
        concerned, the date that divides human history into two equal
        parts is well within my memory.  The world today...is as
        different from the world into which I was born as that world was
        from Julius Caesar's.  Almost as much has happened since I was
        born as happened before" (p.  34).
        
               Toffler (1970) illustrated the power of Boulding's
        statement with this illustration.  "If the past 50,000 years of
        man's existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately 62
        years each, there would be 800 such lifetimes.  Of these, 650 of
        these were spent in caves.  Only during the last 70 lifetimes
        has man communicated via the written word.  Only in the last six
        lifetimes did men see the printed word.  Only in the last four
        have men measured time with any precision.  Only in the last two
        have men used the electric motor.  The overwhelming majority of
        material goods men use today were produced in the present 800th
        lifetime" (p.  15).
        
               By changing our relationship to the resources around us,
        by violently expanding the scope of change, and, most crucially,
        by accelerating its pace, Toffler (1970) maintained we had broken
        irretrievably with the past and cut ourselves off from old ways
        of thinking, feeling, and adapting.  The world was setting the
        stage for a completely new society and was now racing toward
        it.  This was the crux of the 800th lifetime, and it was this
        that called into question man's capacity for adaptation.  How
        would man face this new society?  (p.19)
        
               Continuing his argument, Toffler (1970) described how the
        rate at which man stored up useful knowledge about himself was
        spiraling upward for 10,000 years.  With the invention of
        writing, this rate took a sharp turn upward.  The next great leap
        was caused by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.  Prior
        to 1500, Europe produced 1000 or so titles a year.  It took a
        full century to produce 100,000 titles.  By 1950, four and a half
        centuries later, Europe was producing 120,000 titles per year. 
        What once took a century, now took a mere ten months.  By 1960,
        one decade later, the rate was only seven months to produce the
        same amount.  By the mid 1960's, the output of books on a
        world-wide scale approached 1000 titles per day.  If every book
        was a net gain for the advancement of knowledge, one can hardly
        argue that this new "Information Age" would impact all human
        beings in new and unique kinds of ways.
        
               Toffler (1970) defined, "Ad-hocracy", as the fast-moving,
        information rich organization of the future, filled with
        transient cells and extremely mobile individuals.  He predicted
        it would replace bureaucracy or the slow-moving, information
        stagnant organizations filled with stable cells and sedentary
        individuals present in the world in 1970 (p. 130).  It was
        Toffler's contention that change would became so swift and
        relentless in the techno-societies that "yesterday's truths
        suddenly would become today's fiction, and the most highly
        skilled and intelligent members of society would admit difficulty
        in keeping up with the deluge of new knowledge--even in extremely
        narrow fields" (p.  140).
        
               Dr.  Robert Hilliard (1966), the top educational
        broadcasting specialist for the Federal Communications
        Commission, in concurring with Toffler, pointed out: "At the rate
        that knowledge is growing, by the time the child born today
        graduates from college, the amount of knowledge in the world will
        be four times as great.  By the time that same child is 50 years
        old, it will be 32 times as great, and 97% of everything known in
        the world will be learned since the time was born" (p.  257).  
        
               Hilliard defined a new and unique learning force: the
        adult "baby boomer".  But just how powerful was this adult
        learning force Hilliard referred to in 1966?   Dramatic
        enrollments occurred in the past decade (the 1970's).  Moses
        (1969) called this sort of phenomenon, "the educational
        periphery," estimated its total enrollment in the United States
        as 22 million in 1950, 28 million in 1960, and 82 million in
        1975, almost a three-fold increase in two and a half decades. 
        Cohen (1967) provided some interesting estimates of the total
        "learning force", defined as the total number of learners in
        schools and colleges as well as in the educational periphery.  He
        compared the size of the learning force and the labor force in
        the United States and estimated this ratio at about 83-100 in
        1940 and 1950.  By 1965, the ratio shifted dramatically to
        127-100; the learning force was finally greater than the labor
        force.  Cohen's projected ratio for 1974 was 159-100, another
        significant increase.  Current ratios are probably significantly
        higher and in favor of the learning force as the "baby boom"
        generation continues to age.
        
               Building on Hilliard's and Cohen's positions,  Toffler
        (1970) maintained humans were creating and using up ideas and
        images at a faster and faster pace.  Knowledge, like people,
        places, things and organizational forms was becoming disposable
        (p.  145).  And if it was disposable, teaching young and older
        learners using the traditional principles of education would
        not permit the individual to keep pace with the changes.  There
        was a need for radical revisions in the nature of education of
        both children and adults.
        
               According to Stuart Berg Flexner, senior editor of the
        Random House Dictionary of the English Language, "The words we
        use are changing faster today, and not merely on the slang level.
        
        Of the 450,000 'usable' words in English today, only 250,000
        would be comprehensible to William Shakespeare.  If the Bard
        appeared in New York today, he would only understand five out of
        every nine words.  He would be semi-literate" (Toffler,
        1970, p.  151).  This illustration pointed out that even
        language, the transmitter of the cultural heritage, was rapidly
        becoming new and unique.
        
               In the Preface to Adult Psychology published in 1969,
        Ledford Bischof wrote:
               Ten years from now in 1979 an individual will not be able
        to write a book like this unaided.  Having scoured the literature
        since 1964, one conclusion is inescapable: the "information
        explosion" is so vast and rapidly expanding that one person will
        be totally unable to assimilate or even collate but a portion of
        it...The bibliography, "Learning and Cognitive Performance in
        Adults" has 1,591 items.  Ninety per cent of the items date since
        World War II.
        
               In all the talk about the need for continuing education
        and in all the popular discussions of retraining, there was an
        assumption that man's potentials for re-education are unlimited. 
        But how fast and how continuously can the individual revise his
        inner images of reality before he smashes up against these
        limits?   Nobody knows.  Yet one fact remains, by speeding up
        change in the outer world, Toffler (1970) believed the individual
        was compelled to relearn his environment at every moment.  This
        forced a faster and faster pace of life and a new level of
        adaptability and set the stage for the social illness--Future
        Shock (p.  160).
        
               This push for diversity ignited bitter conflicts in
        education.  Ever since the rise of industrialism, education in
        western civilizations was organized for the mass production of
        basically standardized educational packages.  Toffler described
        the most common complaint of the western student was not being
        treated as individuals.  While the student-consumer was forced to
        make the education industry responsive to his demand for
        diversity, the industrial society resisted.  Though some
        educators were rapidly multiplying the number of alternative
        paths, the pace of diversification was not swift enough for many
        students (p.  241).  The movement in the 1960's for more
        "relevant" education was just a preliminary skirmish in the
        educational struggle to keep pace with the exponential rate of
        change facing it.
        
               According to Daniel P.  Moynihan (1970), the chief White
        House advisor on urban affairs, the United States "exhibits the
        qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown." 
        For the cumulative impact of sensory, cognitive or decisional
        overstimulation, not to mention the physical effects of neural or
        endocrine overload, created sickness in America's midst (p. 169).
        
        
               Toffler (1970) predicted the only way to maintain any
        semblance of equilibrium during the super-industrial revolution
        would be to meet invention with invention -- to design new
        personal and social change regulators (p.  331)  For education he
        believed the lesson was clear: the prime objective must be to
        increase the individual's "cope-ability"--the speed and economy
        with which he can adopt to continual change.  And the faster the
        rate of change, the more attention must be devoted to discerning
        the pattern of future events (p.  357).
        
               The rapid obsolescence of knowledge and the extension of
        life span made it clear that the skills learned in youth were
        unlikely to remain relevant by the time old age arrived.  Toffler
        (1970) advocated for super-industrial education to make provision
        for life-long education.  If learning were to be stretched over a
        lifetime, there was little justification for forcing kids to
        attend school full-time.  "Such innovations imply enormous
        changes in instructional technique.  Today, lecture still
        dominates the classroom.  This method symbolizes the old,
        top-down hierarchical structure.  Lecture must give way to
        a whole new battery of teaching principles and procedures.  It
        must give way to adult learning (andragogy), the art and science
        of adult education" (p.  361).
        
               Education in Toffler's future sense would require that
        educators accept that knowledge will grow increasingly
        perishable.  Today's "facts" become tomorrow's "misinformation." 
        Tomorrow's schools must teach not merely data, but ways to
        manipulate it.  Students (including adults) must learn how to
        discard old ideas and then discover how and when to replace them.
        
        They must learn how to learn, how to create, how to think (p. 
        367).
        
               Psychologist, Herbert Gerjuoy (1970) of the Human
        Resources Organization, stated: "The new education must teach the
        individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to
        evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary,
        how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to
        look at problems from a new direction -- how to teach himself. 
        Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will
        be the man who has not learned how to learn.  It must combine a
        variety of 'factual' content with universal training in what
        might be termed 'life-know-how'" (p.367).  Three hundred and
        fifty
        years after Cervante's death, scientists were still finding
        evidence to support his insight to adaptive change.  He wrote,
        "Forewarned fore-armed."  Hugh Brown, a noted psychologist,
        wrote, "Anticipating information allows...a dramatic change in
        performance."  Freud added, "Thought is action in rehearsal." 
        Learners must be taught along with the 3 R's, how to think, how
        to learn, how to create a new way to be (p. 371).
        
               When millions share a passion about the future, Toffler
        (1970) believed mankind would be moving toward a society better
        equipped to meet the impact of change.  To create such curiosity
        and awareness would be the cardinal task of all education.  To
        create an educational system that instilled curiosity into
        the learning process would be the central mission of future
        education.  Education would shift into the future tense. 
        Attending a class on the sociology of the future, Charles Stein,
        a 70 year old man, said, "I am a needle worker all my life.  I am
        70 years old, and I want to get what I didn't get in my youth.  I
        want to know about the future.  I want to die an educated man"
        (p. 378).  Toffler believed Stein symbolized the 21st century
        learner, one who never stopped pursuing knowledge regardless of
        his age, a true lifelong learner motivated to transcend age and
        ignorance.
        
               Toffler (1970) concluded that we often failed to recognize
        that the faster pace of life demanded and created a new kind of
        information system in society: "a loop rather than a ladder."  He
        believed information must pulse through this loop with
        accelerating speeds, with the output of one group becoming the
        input for many others, so that no one group, however, politically
        potent it may seem, can independently set goals for the whole (p.
        
        421).  
        
               Future Shock created a stir for a period of time, but just
        like Thorndike's predictions at Harvard in 1931, Toffler's input
        was not readily accepted by the educational establishment.
        
               A decade later, Toffler (1980) continued his explication
        of the changes facing civilization in The Third Wave.  He used
        the image of colliding waves to explain the nature of the
        conflict between the Second Wave (Industrial Society) and Third
        Wave (Information Society).  Though the colliding of the
        waves of change was the grand metaphor for Toffler's work, it was
        not original to him.  Norbert Elias, in his The Civilizing
        Process (1937), referred to "a wave of advancing integration over
        several centuries."  He described the settlement of the American
        West in terms of successive "waves" --first the pioneers, then
        the farmers, then the business interests, the "third wave" of
        migration.  
        
             In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner cited the same analogy in
        his classic essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American
        History."  It was not the wave metaphor that was fresh, but its
        application to today's civilizational shift.  The wave idea was
        not only a tool for organizing vast masses of highly diverse
        information, but it also helped readers to peer beneath the
        raging surface of change.  By applying the wave metaphor, what
        was confusing became clearer.  The familiar often appears in a
        dazzlingly fresh light.  
        
             Once Toffler (1980) began thinking in terms of waves of
        change, colliding and overlapping, causing conflict and tension
        around us, it changed the perception of change itself.  In every
        field from education and health to technology, from personal life
        to politics, it became impossible to distinguish those
        innovations that were merely cosmetic, or just extensions of the
        industrial past, from those that were truly revolutionary (pp. 
        5-6).
        
               Until now, (realize this was just ten years since he wrote
        Future Shock), Toffler (1980) declared, "the human race has
        undergone two great waves of change, each one obliterating
        earlier cultures or civilizations and replacing them with ways of
        life inconceivable to those who came before.  The First Wave of
        Change-the agricultural revolution took thousands of years to
        play out.  The Second Wave-the rise of industrial
        civilization-took a mere three hundred years to unfold.  The
        Third Wave-the Information Civilization or Age-sweeps across the
        world now.  It is highly technical and anti-industrial,
        based upon diversified, renewable sources of energy, methods of
        production that make assembly lines obsolete, non-nuclear
        families, radically changed schools and corporations of the
        future" (p.  10).  
        
               Toffler (1980) maintained "we are in the final generation
        of an old civilization and the first generation of a new one." 
        He based his position on what he called a "revolutionary
        premise."  He assumed that even though the decades ahead were
        likely to be filled with upheavals, turbulence, perhaps
        even widespread violence, they would totally destroy the old
        civilization.  The momentum of the First Wave was spent.  The
        momentum of industrialization was still being felt, but its force
        was nearly spent too.  The colliding of the two waves caused the
        turbulence.  The high technology nations reeled from the
        collision between the Third Wave and the obsolete encrusted
        economies and institutions of the Second Wave.  Toffler believed
        most people in the rich countries were essentially Second Wave
        people trying to maintain the dying order, a growing body of
        Third Wave people who were constructing a radically different
        tomorrow, and a confused, self-cancelling mixture of the
        two (p.  16).
        
               One of the major successes of the Second Wave, Toffler
        (1980) believed, was the creation of a central structure of mass
        education.  With this type of system in place the industrial age
        flourished, because it was fostering the growth of people to fuel
        the engines of mass production.  Mass education was a humanizing
        step forward.  Yet Second Wave schools machined generation after
        generation of young people into a pliable work force of the
        type required by electromechanical technology and the assembly
        line (p.  29).
        
               In his view, Toffler (1980) speculated the corporation had
        become the main organizational form of the Second Wave.  The six
        codes of the Industrial Corporation were: 1) Standardization; 2)
        Specialization; 3) Synchronization;  4) Concentration; 5)
        Maximization 6) Centralization.  (p.  30).  But while
        these served the industrial complex and corporations well for
        nearly half a century, they were outmoded codes for the coming of
        the Third Wave (p. 120).  Each one of these codes was
        antithetical to the Third Wave, information rich civilization
        where customization through creativity would dominate.
        
               The essence of Second Wave manufacturing was the "long
        run" of millions of identical, standardized products.  By
        contrast, the essence of Third Wave manufacturing would be the
        short run of partially or completely customized products.  Where
        students were once mass produced , now education would become
        customized for each individual to assist him or her to
        maximize individual potential (Toffler, 1980, p.  181).  Adult
        education principles fostered this type of special education. 
        Adults who matriculated in the Second Wave school system would
        need to learn new ways to think, to synthesize, to create.       
        
               Because the Third Wave was not yet dominant even in the
        most technically advanced nations, Toffler (1980) believed humans
        would continue to feel the tug of powerful Second Wave currents. 
        Movements aimed at turning back the clock like the
        "Back-To-Basics" movement in the United States schools was one
        example he cited.  Outraged by the disaster in mass
        education, Second Wave supporters failed to recognize that a
        demassified society called for new educational strategies.  They
        sought instead to restore and enforce Second Wave uniformity in
        the schools.  But all their attempts to achieve uniformity were
        essentially the rear-guard actions of a spent civilization.  The
        thrust of the Third Wave charge was toward increased diversity,
        not toward the further standardization of life, and least of all,
        rote learning (p.  256).
        
               For Third Wave civilizations, the basic raw material would
        be the one that cannot be exhausted and that is information and
        imagination.  Using these materials, researchers would find new
        and inexhaustible resources.  This substitution would all too
        frequently be accompanied by drastic economic swings and lurches
        (Toffler, 1980, p.  351).  He acknowledged that the adult
        educator's task must be to prompt the adult learner into using
        the information resources available to him.  Imagination, not
        rote learning, needed to be fostered, encouraged, rewarded.  To
        prepare the adult learner for the Third Wave ultimately meant a
        movement away from the antiquated 3 R's and toward learning how
        to learn, to think, to create (p.  352).
        
               Toffler (1980) predicted education would change and that
        learning would occur outside, rather than inside the classroom. 
        Compulsory schooling would grow shorter, not longer.  Rigid age
        segregation of young and old would cease.  Education would become
        more interspersed with work, and spread out over a lifetime.  His
        conclusion was that "Lifelong learning will become the new state
        of art educational technology.  The mission will be to make all
        people realize their human potential" (p.  384).  
        
               This theme of a new corporation and a new learning
        environment, a lifelong learning experience was promoted in
        Naisbitt and Aburdene's Reinventing the Corporation (1985) and
        added to the evolutionary waves rolling upon the seashores of
        civilizations and corporations around the world.  It was
        essential, the authors wrote, to bring quality and accountability
        back into all phases of education.  They believed educators must
        introduce new skills that are appropriate to the information
        society and are equally valuable in the classroom and in the
        corporation - thinking, learning, and creating (p. 125).  Today's
        education system - the one some reformers want to elevate to
        the level of excellence - was never meant to serve the needs of
        today's information society; it was custom-made to fit the
        industrial society and a time when it made sense to treat
        everyone the same (p.120-121).
        
               Unfortunately, control, centralization in the factory and
        in management were the ideals of industrial society.  The schools
        were modeled in the image and likeness of these industrial values
        right for the time, but horrendously wrong today.  Individuality,
        creativity, the ability to think for oneself -- these new values
        -- were hardly considered assets on the assembly line or even in
        the executive suite.  Along side the three R's, the authors
        proposed it was time to give young people a little thinking,
        learning, creating--the high-tech, high-touch skills on which the
        new information society and the new corporations need to be built
        (Naisbitt & Aburdene, 1985, p.  123).  
        
               In a world of rapid technological change, the basis of
        2000 A.D. would not be the basis of 1984, the authors' predicted.
        
        This is a mere 16 years or a half-life for a generation (30
        years).  "Thinking has to do with the way information is arranged
        and re-arranged to make decisions, solve problems, create
        opportunities, and raise human potential," said Edward de
        Bono (1982), founder of the largest program in the world for
        teaching thinking as a specific skill.  "Thinking is the most
        fundamental and important skill.  Like all human skills, it can
        be learned and developed," he believed. "Information is no
        substitute for thinking and thinking is no substitute for
        information."  He maintained the dilemma was that there was never
        enough time to teach all the information that could usefully be
        taught (p.  32).  
        
               Naisbitt and Aburdene (1985) concurred with deBono.  The
        more information an individual possessed, the more competent
        thinker he would be.  With the overabundance of data, individuals
        often lack the thinking ability to sort it all out.  deBono, and
        the authors, believed in a world that is constantly changing,
        there is no one subject or set of subjects that will serve the
        individual for the foreseeable future, let alone for the rest of
        a person's life.  The most important skill to acquire now is
        learning how to learn (p.  132).
        
               Learning how to learn requires humility.  "You have to be
        able to concede...that there are those who are better and
        cleverer than oneself," wrote Davis Lessing, in an article
        entitled, "Learning How to Learn" (Naisbitt and Aburdene, 1985,
        p.  134).  Learning sometimes requires finding the right
        teacher and becoming a proper apprentice or surrendering one's
        previous conceptions to create the openness needed for real
        learning.  Learning how to learn requires self-knowledge.  It
        means answering questions such as, "How do I learn best?" and
        "When do I learn best?" (Best, 1982).
        
               In new corporations as well as in new educational systems,
        creativity and individuality will become organizational
        treasures.  Roger Von Oech (1983) wrote, "Its really hard to see
        the ideas that are right on the side of you or behind you.  It's
        hard to seek fresh ideas by looking twice as hard in one
        direction.  Often, people need is a whack on the side of the
        head." (p.  20).
        
               How does one give oneself a whack on the side of the head?
        
         Von Oech (1983) suggested the following:
             1.   Challenge the rules.
             2.   Inspect your own rules.
             3.   Fall out of love with your own rules and ideas.
             4.   Think frivolously, make jokes about problems you're
                  working on (p.  6-10).
        
               The new information society was preparing to whack the
        second wave supporters on the side of the head.  Where the only
        constant is change, Naisbitt and Aburdene (1985) hypothesized,
        individuals can no longer expect to get an education and be done
        with it.  "There is no education, no one skill, that lasts a
        lifetime.  Like it or not, the information society (Third Wave)
        will turn individuals into lifelong learners who must
        periodically upgrade their marketable skills and expand their
        capacity for knowledge" (p.  141).
        
               The economic and political megashifts of the past decade
        brought a tidal wave of adults back into the classroom.  These
        lifelong learners included would-be career changers, upwardly
        mobile MBA types, engineers and technicians in fast-changing
        fields, homemakers re-entering the job market, executives and
        former auto and steel workers.  "Virtually everyone who comes
        in the door to take a course is doing so for job related
        reasons," said one continuing education director.  "Very little
        of it is for enrichment" (Source: U.S.  News and World Report,
        1983, p.  271).
        
               The authors described how corporations and educational
        institutions were re-inventing education for adult learners by
        scheduling courses at the convenience of the student and not the
        school.  Universities were becoming more like businesses, and
        corporations were becoming more like universities of lifelong
        learning (Naisbitt and Aburdene, 1985, p.143).  
        
               Several social scientists studied adult populations marked
        by especially high achievement, learning and affective growth to
        determine how these new adult learners fit into the scheme of the
        reinvented educational systems.  Examples included individual
        gifted adults who were also high achievers (Terman & Oden, 1947),
        the self-actualizing adults studied by Maslow (1954), the
        outstanding creative scientists interviewed by Roe (1953), men
        and women conspicuously engaged in continuing learning (Houle,
        1961), and the fully functioning person (Rogers, 1961). 
        Describing the "beautiful and noble person" Landsman (1969) said
        that the same kind of person is also sometimes called productive,
        efficient, self-fulfilled, self-realized, or a superperson. 
        Maslow (1969) added these phrases: The Good Person, the
        self-evolving person, the "responsible for himself and his own
        evolution person", the fully awakened man, and the fully human
        person.  Tough (1970) asked how do these people live their lives?
        
        
             These populations were marked by learning, by efforts to
        achieve their inherent potential, and by curiosity and joie de
        vivre.  Yet, these people liked their present job, understood and
        accepted their own characteristics, and were satisfied with their
        present self.  They possessed the confidence and courage to take
        risks at self-disclosure.  They demonstrated clearly directed
        interests.  They chose their own career and activities and were
        not pushed by external forces.  They showed a strong but
        realistic commitment to some mission in life.  They strived to
        achieve certain major goals and were spurred on rather than
        blocked by obstacles, and are productive and successful. 
        Their relationship with at least a few people tended to be
        compassionate, loving, frank, and effective (Tough, 1979, p.28). 
        Viewed as a group, they were individuals quite unlike their mass
        produced forbearers who did not question the nature of the system
        in which they were indoctrinated.
        
               In an information society, Naisbitt and Aburdene (1985)
        predicted that training and development would no longer be an
        amenity; it would be the prime tool for growing people and
        profits within the corporate environment (p. 173).  "There are
        sophisticated and growing systems of education with roots
        firmly planted in the American business community and spreading
        to countries around the world," said Dr. Nell Eunch (Eunch,
        1981, p.  275). 
        
             Corporations as well as the educational establishment would
        be engaged in the information age in re-educating the second-wave
        adult learner in preparation for the changes taking place in
        society.
        
               The authors concluded their argument for a reinvention of
        not only the corporation, but also education by citing the
        foreword to the Carnegie report, in which the former U.S. 
        Commissioner of Education, Ernest Boyer (1981) stated: "It would
        be ironic if significant new insights about how we learn
        would come, not from the academy, but from industry and business"
        (p.  276).