SOURCE: Kirp, David L. “How Johnny Will Learn Tomorrow.” Christian Science Monitor (3 April 1974): F5.

In the following review, Kirp argues that Learning for Tomorrow: The Role of the Future in Education is primarily a catalogue of complaints about the current education system, commenting that many of the central points in the book are vastly oversimplified.

Historically, schooling has been treated as a way to hand on the values of the past.

But that role, the contributors to Learning for Tomorrow suggest, is an incomplete one: education must also contain an understanding of the future, and attempt to make sense out of where we are going—not just where we have been.

But no one knows where we are going. Only the seer and the fool can predict with any assurance. The rest of us just muddle along.

“The future” has no single meaning: it is a kind of...