Ladies and Gentlemen, Good Morning.

I'd like to talk this morning about a central focus of my work in "trend analysis," which attempts to understand the technological, cultural, geopolitical, and spiritual changes taking place in the world around us and what those changes may mean for us.

I'd like to look this morning at three of these trends, three categories of change, and then say a word about what they might mean for education.

The first trend is Globalization. Everyone has some idea of what globalization means. Most of the discussion about globalization focuses on trade, currency relationships, and the need for all nations to adopt free markets and democratic political systems.

But globalization is much more than economic and financial integration. The essence of globalization is the human instinct for greater communication between peoples and cultures, and the subsequent merging of modes of life — including economics — as well as beliefs.

This process began very slowly in the 16th century with European exploration and colonialization of Africa, South America and Asia. It wasn't called globalization then. It was called exploration and colonialization. That was when the natural resources of other parts of the world began to be important to the economies of Europe. Thus the different parts of the world that had been relatively ignorant of each other began a process of communication and integration that would increase over the next five centuries. The world began to shrink, and peoples of different cultures began to know more about each other.

In its present phase, globalization means that western scientific, social, cultural and philosophical ideas are gradually seeping into the fabric of the rest of the world, as well as a reciprocal transfer of culture and lifestyles from non-western nations to the west.

Americans sometimes forget that the pace of globalization is driven by how fast Americans develop new information technology. No nation today can develop without adjusting to the global economic system anchored in American information technology. Thus the faster information transfer technology we produce, the faster other nations must change their established patterns of living.

We Americans are often insensitive to the deep psychological trauma nations are experiencing as they confront the effects of globalization. Americans, raised on constant technological change say, "Adapt. Let the old ways go. Embrace the new." But much of the world says, "Wait a minute. Too much change too fast is shredding our traditions, and our traditions are our connection to the past. If we change them too quickly, we'll endanger our social cohesion and psychic stability." Many thoughtful Muslims, for example, clearly fear that the western model of globalization, based on secular, scientific rationalism, will eventually bring about the end of Islam.

In the end, the test of globalization is not simply technical or economic, but a profoundly human challenge as well. Technology can bring people physically face-to-face with each other in an instant. But it takes much longer for our minds and hearts to grow together. The closer nations and cultures come together through technology and travel, the more important it becomes for perspective to widen, and for mutual understanding and compassion to grow. Otherwise we get hostility and conflict, not friendship and harmony. Therein lies the human challenge of globalization, and it confronts every single one of us.

The second trend is Migration: The world is in the midst of the largest migration in world history. In China alone, there are one hundred million people on the move from the countryside to the cities. This is causing urban problems of a magnitude never before experienced.

In the West, migration is literally changing the face of Europe. No European nation is reproducing its Caucasian population. The OECD estimates the European Union needs 180 million immigrants in the next three decades simply to keep its population at 1995 levels, as well as to keep the current ratio of retirees to workers. In Brussels, over fifty percent of the babies born are Muslim. In Germany, the death rate has exceeded the birth rate for decades, so they now have to fly in planeloads of technicians from India just to maintain their high tech structure. In England, there are now more practicing Muslims than Anglicans.

In Italy, the Archbishop of Bologna recently warned that Italy is in danger of "losing its identity" due to the immigration from North Africa and central Europe. The Catholic Church is facing the distinct probability of Islam eventually becoming the largest European religion. The fear of such demographic shifts and their potential consequences is the subtext for everything else happening in Europe today. It's far more traumatic than adjusting to increased economic integration or to the euro.

The same thing is happening in the United States. The U.S. accepts more immigrants per year than the rest of the world combined. As a result of Hispanic immigration, Miami is now the northernmost city of Latin America. Immigration means that by 2050, Americans of European decent will be a minority in the U.S.

In the coming years, the faces of many nations will be very different than they are today. Traditional images of what it means to be French, German, Italian, English or Finnish are going to change just as radically as the image of what it means to be American has been changing in recent decades.

The third trend is Technology: We have reached a new stage of technology development for which there is no precedent in the history of science and technology. For the first three hundred years of modern science, scientists generally thought that the purpose of science and technology was to "better the human condition" — to make life better for people. That is not necessarily true any longer. Two aspects of this I'll mention are first, the rate of technological change, and second, the character of that change.

The rate of change. The technology experts estimate that the rate of technological change doubles every decade — 20% one decade, 40% the next decade, 80% the third decade, and so on. In other words, what we're experiencing is the acceleration of acceleration itself.

It's estimated that at today's rate of technological change, the 21st century as a whole will experience nearly one thousand times more technological change than did the 20th century. By 2030, $1,000 worth of computation will be a thousand times more powerful than the human brain. By 2050, there will be desktop computers with the intelligence equivalent to the combined intelligence of everyone on earth. At that point, people may be of biological origin, but their mental processes will be a mixture of their biological thinking and the electronic processes embedded in their brain — the two processes working intimately together.

Obviously, as the speed of computers increases, the pace of everything else we do in life accelerates. One only has to look back at the last two or three decades to see how faster computers have accelerated the pace of life.

Psychologists tell us that one of the by-products of such rapid change is that overwhelming people with more technological change than they can absorb and fit into their mental picture of life will clearly lead to various forms of emotional and mental instability. We see mounting evidence of that happening. Multiplying social pathologies indicate human resistance to too rapid change. Thirty years ago, major corporations didn't have to think much about stress and the mental health of their employees. Now, mental and emotional health is the fastest growing component of health insurance for many companies. To help relieve the mounting pressures, some companies provide employees with special rooms for relaxing, meditation, prayer, taking naps or listening to music or reading poetry.

Other indicators tell of further psychic disturbances caused by too rapid a pace of change. Loneliness has reached epidemic proportions. Attention deficit disorder, or ADD, is skyrocketing not just for children, but also for adults. Books are now written for eight year-old children advising them how to recognize the symptoms of stress, and how to deal with it. Addictions stemming from an ever-increasing tempo of life are on the rise. Thus the University of Louisville concludes in a study on health that our very mode of life has now become our principle cause of emotional and mental instability.

Then we must consider the character of change. Science is now in the process of redefining our understanding of terms first given us at the dawn of human consciousness: such terms as "life," "nature" and "human." Some examples. One of the world's foremost authorities on artificial intelligence predicts, "When machines are derived from human intelligence but are a million times more capable, there won't be a clear distinction between human and machine intelligence — there's going to be a merger." He sees the time when hundreds of nanobots — computers the size of a molecule — will be racing around in our bodies monitoring our physical functions, transmitting that information to a chip embedded in our brain, which then transmits it further to a central computer. Other scientists suggest that genetic advances will give every woman the "right to a custom made child." They believe that women should be allowed the right to "choose the characteristics of their child from a catalog," or in other words, "Designer children."

Thus arrives what some scientists call the "post-human" or "post-species" age. And let me emphasize, this is not science fiction. What we've been talking about makes up the life work of some of the world's most brilliant and accomplished scientists, most of them at our best universities.

Finally, what are the implications for education of all we've been discussing? I'd like to consider this question in the context of a speech given by a student leader at the graduation ceremony at one of America's most prestigious universities. He described his class as "not knowing how it relates to the past or the future, having little sense of the present, no life-sustaining beliefs, secular or religious," and consequently, "no goal and no path of effective action."

Against this background, I suggest the primary question is this: In an age when globalization is erasing all the old boundaries that provided identity, when young people get more information from watching TV than they do from sixteen years of classroom instruction, when all knowledge is available by the press of a computer button, when televised commercial advertising has become the primary source of value formation, then the basic question becomes, "What is education? What is the product education seeks to produce?"

The world is experiencing an upheaval of greater consequence than — to put it in terms of the Western experience — the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution combined. Thus education needs to enable young people to grapple with questions far beyond the conventional concerns of traditional education. Questions such as: In an age of global impressions and easy mobility, how does education foster a sense of rootedness in time and place? In a technology-driven age, how does education strengthen the enduring human values that give meaning and fulfillment to the individual? In an age where everything is in flux — national purpose, collective values, institutional integrity — how does education help the individual find stability and anchorage? How does education equip students to decide what is essential to know — not just academically, but within the wider culture — when there is so much that can be known?

Then there's the question of how does education help us understand the human-technology relationship? Technology is not a passive tool. It is an active agent that affects the user. The computer and Internet are primary in this respect. Dr. Philip Tobias of South Africa, one of the world's foremost anthropologists, has described the Internet as "the most significant social development since the advent of language." In a sense, the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century pales in comparison with the coming of the Internet. So what does this imply for educating students about computers and the Internet? Students need to be taught to be aware of the potential negative effects of technology so they control their technology and don't let technology control them. This is not easy, but it's a major factor in avoiding the boredom, loneliness and alienation so many students feel today.

Finally, the question of how does education help answer the crisis of identity that is engulfing our young people? All the traditional sources of identity are in upheaval — family, ethnic group, nation, culture and religion. Thus we see students increasingly turning to technology to seek some source of identity. Young children used to find identity in relationship to animals — the family dog or a pet gerbil. Now they turn to computerized toys or computer games. Adolescents increasingly find identity through various "chat rooms" on the Internet. As they jump in and out of these chat rooms, they intentionally display differing aspects of their personalities, depending on whom they're talking with and how they want to appear. The result is that young people are not being true to their deepest inner selves, and they're developing what psychologists call "multiple personalities." Many are finding it easier to cope with the "pseudo-reality" of a chat room than with life's authentic reality off the Internet. This is the antithesis of the purpose of human growth and maturation — indeed, of education — which has been to develop a unified personality. Helping students understand and come to terms with such issues is one of education's greatest challenges.

Such issues are not easily answered. But it seems to me that the task of education in a time of upheaval is to at least set a student on the path of seeking answers to the right set of questions. For the historic function of education is not so much to provide answers, as it is to equip young people to ask the right questions.

Thank you.