Alvin Toffler (born October 3, 1928) U.S. futurist – Future Shock (1970)
Read more about Alvin Toffler here
Read an interview with Alvin Toffler here
S+B: In the book, you write of education’s failure to move from the industrial age to the knowledge economy. Is homeschooling a prosumer response to this crisis?
TOFFLER: Yes, now that you mention it. It is an important and growing form of prosuming. The parents do it themselves, because the market does not supply what they want or need, or for that matter what the market needs.
Think about how we learned to use personal computers. PC use went from zero to hundreds of millions of people who know and use PCs routinely, and nobody went to school to learn how.
Instead, chances are you found a “guru,” and a guru was anyone who bought his PC a week before you bought yours. And there were user groups — volunteers passing valuable knowledge back and forth. If you agree that the PC has had an impact on productivity in the money economy, then the fact that people taught each other how to use this thing without money changing hands is another example of what a big impact prosumers can have on the money economy. Add these things together — homeschooling, teaching how to use PCs, Linux, etc. — and you begin to understand this big invisible economic force.
Watch Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi, talk about the obsolete educational system
here
John Patrick Shanley (born October 3, 1950) U.S. playwright, screenwriter – Moonstruck (1987)
