Dr Richard Watkins - Director and Chief Executive, New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

A paper for the AARE/NZARE annual conference, Melbourne November/December 1999.

It's not the quantity, but the pertinence of your words that does the business - Seneca 4BCE - 65CE Epistles to Lucilius

Education, more properly a drawing forth, implies not so much the communication of knowledge as the discipline of the intellect, the establishment of the principles, and the regulation of the heart.

Now there's a fine injunction with which to begin.

In beginning an address which focuses on the next millenium, it is as well to ask how much can we take from looking back?

Almost at the eve of a spent millenium and the dawn of the e-age, should we ask whether history is relevant any more? More importantly, is past practice relevant to the future?

Let me at the outset though, suggest to you at least one guiding principle:

Alan Kay, inventor of the computer mouse once said: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it.".

T S Eliot phrased it rather differently:

The future according to Ambrose Bierce, writing in The Devil's Dictionary is:

And in Eliot again we find:

This paper contends that humans are naturally philosophical and inquiring. Brought face to face with the wonders of nature or the results of human endeavour, we are not generally content merely to observe the phenomena as they are offered to our senses, but feel impelled by our natural thirst for knowledge to investigate the causes through which these phenomena were produced.

By being philosophical we mean, however, not any haphazard explanation of prime causes but intelligent and reflective research into the realities of things such as will justify the position of first causes from which arise the phenomena of life.

Since humans are by nature philosophical, it is inevitable that the earliest records of our thinking should manifest something of that human quest of ultimate causes and that human effort to make a deep unification of knowledge.

There is a theory that states: "If anyone finds out what the universe is for it will disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable." There is another theory that states: "This has already happened"...Douglas Adams, Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

Change is happening at an ever faster rate today - driven partly by technological changes leading to changes in all other areas of our lives, and by the increasing interdependence between countries and peoples, as well as the de-centralisation of societies and institutions within countries which is also furthered by information technologies.

In post-World War ll era, we have come to recognise that change occurs at different times and in different ways.

W Edwards Deming, who together with Juran, is the principal founder of what we now call total quality management, and a number of others, recognised they were attempting to grapple with systems which were at the same time complex and interrelated. Further, that these same systems were undergoing profound and rapid changes.

Systemic change manifested itself in quite distinct ways:

• incremental change through examination and improvement of existing processes, i.e. the kind of change we see in the development of a consumer item such as the motor-car which has evolved slowly over a period more than sixty years - although the manufacturers would like us to think otherwise;

• discontinuous, or large-step change, which occurs out of the blue and which may be a sudden change in the external environment, e.g., the first major post war oil crisis of the early 1970s; or it may be internal, such as the development of a previously unconsidered, product or marketing opportunity.

But lest you think that our approach to change is a new one, or even innovative, consider the ancient Greek Eleatics so called as they came from the city of Elea where notable members of this group lived and taught, were impressed by the variety and changeability of the world.

Interestingly, the Eleatics concluded that change is incompatible with substantial reality. Hence they taught that there really is no change; all change is illusion. "All is; nothing becomes." All bodies are of the same essential nature.

The Eleatics, important among whom were Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Melissus of Samos, of the 6th to 4th century BCE, were monists, that is they taught that there is only one kind of bodily substance. By implication they were also pantheists, for they made the matter of the world self-explaining, hence necessary and eternal, and therefore divine.

And of course the Sophists, from the Greek sophoi or the wise ones, took up the epistemological question. They concluded that no one can know anything with certainty - a doctrine of scepticism.

Protagoras, who lived in the 5th century BCE said that everything is in a state of becoming; there is no stable being.

Accordingly, humanity's knowledge is never absolute; it is relative to the subject, that is: the person who possesses it raising issues of both relativism and subjectivism, so that what is regarded as true for one person at one time may be false to another person, or to the same person at another time. The individual is thus the measure of truth; "man is the measure of things".

More importantly, in this age of change the only certainty is further uncertainty. In addition, what has changed is the very pattern of change itself. If it is mapped it should no longer appear as some increasingly steep curve or nicely plotted line, rather a series of irregular peaks and troughs reflecting the unpredictabilities and vicissitudes of the world in which we now live.

This notion of continuing change leads seemingly inexorably to issues strongly related to uncertainty. These are neatly illustrated - if not comprehensively explained - by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

The uncertainty principle is a good example of how the fundamentals of modern physics can contradict the axioms of common sense.

An odd aspect of quantum mechanics is contained in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This can be stated in different ways, not the least of which is in terms of momentum and position.

If there is a particle, such as an electron, moving through space, its motion can be characterised by telling you where it is (its position) and what its velocity is (more precisely, its momentum). Now, let me say something which might appear somewhat strange if not paradoxical about what happens when attempts are made to measure its position and momentum.

Classically, i.e., in our macroscopic world, these two quantities can be measured to infinite precision (more or less). There is really no question where something is and what its momentum is.

In the world of quantum mechanics, the idea that we can measure things exactly breaks down. Let me state this notion more precisely. Suppose a particle has momentum p and a position x.

In a quantum mechanical world, p and x cannot be measured precisely. There is an uncertainty associated with each measurement, e.g., there is some dp and dx, which can never be eliminated even in a perfect experiment - if such a thing exists.

This is due to the fact that whenever measurements are made, the system is disturbed. In short, in order for us to know something is there, we must literally bump into it.

The size of the uncertainties are not independent, they are related by:

dp x dx > h / (2 x pi) = Planck's constant / ( 2 x pi ).

The preceding is a statement of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

So, for example, if I measure x exactly, the uncertainty in p, dp, must be infinite in order to keep the product constant.

This uncertainty leads to many strange things. For example, in a world of quantum mechanics, it is seemingly impossible to predict where a particle will be with 100 per cent certainty. Thus we can only speak in terms of probabilities.

For example, I can say that an atom will be at some location with a 99 per cent probability, but there will be a 1 per cent probability it will be somewhere else (in fact, there will be a small but finite probability that it will be found across the universe). This is indeed passing strange.

We do not know if this indeterminism is actually the way the universe works because the theory of quantum mechanics is probably incomplete. That is, we do not know if the universe actually behaves in a probabilistic manner (there are many possible paths a particle can follow and the observed path is chosen probabilistically), or if the universe is deterministic in the sense that I can predict the path a particle will follow with 100 per cent certainty.

A consequence of the quantum mechanical nature of the world, is that particles can appear in places where they have no right to be - from an ordinary, common-sense or classical point of view!

Before the advent of quantum physics, science believed that determinism ruled the universe. Now, with the principle of uncertainty, it has become clear that nature cannot be explained in purely causal mechanistic terms. The most we could talk about is probability, thus leaving room to re-accommodate such unscientific phenomena as free will and moral responsibility which had been entirely dismissed by earlier scientific thinkers.

Quantum mechanics introduces an observer-dependency that the popular press has, on more than one occasion, blown out of proportion. What really exists is not waves or particles or any other transitory appearance in the phenomenal realm. Quantum mechanics confirms the existence of harmonies that are independent of us.

Might we not also enter similar realms in our approaches to education, and to educational research as we begin a new century - at least as recorded by the current era calendar?

In the language of Scottish Law, the experimental apparatus is both "art and part" in bringing about that which appears to happen. Individual properties are brought into being in part by our choice of questions to ask, issues to ignore, and answers to heed. When a new question is asked in conjunction with a new experimental arrangement, the previous properties vanish and have no control over the new ones that appear.

To effectively manage the future, and within it educational research and what it might do, means seeing change as the norm and that it is accelerating. It also means seeing events as interrelated i.e., within a whole systems context and not as separate or unconnected pieces of some larger puzzle. Continuing to see the world in fragmentary terms may no longer be as helpful as it once might have appeared.

This seems to suggest that we need to take a holistic, or whole systems perspective, in looking at change. More so, because those charged with research, investigation and enquiry are ultimately numbered among the commentators and architects of change itself. It also suggests accepting as a premise that there are many alternative futures and the equally clear need to distinguish between possible, probable, and preferable futures.

It is as well too, that we remember in education we are dealing with contrasting and sometimes competing pressures and issues including the extent to which the paradigm associated with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies. Increasingly, as western countries at least, have moved to mass education systems - including mass rather than elite higher education - there are far larger numbers of individuals who are significantly less homogeneous than once might have been the case. This change has its origins in diverse sources - population increase, widening access in secondary and tertiary education, and in the impact of equity and equal opportunity.

How researchers and research deals with individuals and groups who stand well outside preconceived norms is an issue we must face, and one which is commented on later in this paper.

Consider the advice of the noted physicist Max Planck, who in 1933 wrote of quantum mechanics

Is this not also true of educational research? Measurements, however made, furnish us with signs we must interpret and from which we must make meaning. Saussure, as you will read later in this paper said broadly similar things about language as an arbitrary phenomenon.

So too, governments are concerned about the value of their investments in education. Something of a fallacy in reality, because governments are creatures of the democracies which elect them, and should therefore reflect the genuine concerns of the people, rather than of some oft-times isolated cabal or cadre. This idealistic notion however seems to carry little sway in the pragmatic world of realpolitik.

These factors, together with many others, do not act in concert. In fact, they are sometimes diametrically opposed. But they have given rise to a simultaneous and marked increase in initiatives - often inspired by central governments which have the economic clout to precipitate change - many of which bear upon the curriculum, assessment, and like matters in schools and elsewhere.

Most of us would be only too well aware that the rate of change, and the nature of it, has led our schools and educational institutions and those who work and learn within them - to be literally bombarded with imperatives, policies, practices, and procedures. Usually these are couched in what appear to be straightforward terms, and usually they contain a predominant if not a singular message - the need to raise educational standards, which are invariably never defined or specified beyond the rhetorical.

In addressing change and of the discoveries we apparently make, we need to be mindful of what Teilhard de Chardin wrote:

The end of the Cold War has changed political and economic borders, systems, and alignments, as everyone now seeks to become part of a global economy and society, while still maintaining national, ethnic, and cultural identities and meaning. While the danger of all-out nuclear war - read mutually assured destruction - between the former Eastern and Western blocs has greatly receded, with the end of the Cold War, nuclear terrorism remains a danger, and other issues, such as sustainable development and preservation of the environment, have gained greater ascendancy.

These factors, together with many others, have made it necessary for governments, businesses, organisations, and people to better understand change and the future, since we will all be living and working in a future world that promises to be very different from today in significant ways. It seems axiomatic to assert that when people better understand change, they also often see more opportunities for their lives and ways to better positively influence the future that is being created.

HG Wells was one of the first to openly advocate a scientific approach toward determining future trends. In his day, the study of the pre-historic past was a recent innovation. For so long, nobody imagined that examining rock layers, fossils, and artifacts could give us such clear views of the world before. Wells asserted that indicators of the present could, to a degree, be read as signposts pointing toward the future:

In Clark's book Profiles of the Future, he offers a few basic pointers. Central to his approach, is to avoid the failure of nerve and the failure of imagination.

When considering the failure of nerve, he discusses how so many seemingly competent thinkers ignored all evidence and insisted that humans would never be able to fly. Then years later, there were the same kind of predictions that humans would never be able to escape earth and fly into space. The fact that birds, bats, and insects could fly should have been a good hint about the validity of their views.

Perhaps though, we ought to be wary of some reforms such as those famously suggested by one Samuel Clements - otherwise known as Mark Twain - in A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling.

Needless to say, predicting the future is a notoriously difficult exercise, characterised by far more heroic failures than notable successes - at least in the sense of prediction alone.

Consider for example the following.

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist ... ." General Pinkerton at the Battle of Spotsylvania in the US Civil War.

"I wonder whether they've done the span calculations corre ... ." Klinker a famous engineer as his train plunged of a bridge into the River Rhone.

"Die my dear doctor, that is the last thing I shall do." Attributed to Palmerston, a British Prime Minister upon which he promptly did with an extra-ordinary sense of timing.

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." (Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949.)

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." (Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.)

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." (The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.)

"But what ... is it good for?" (Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.)

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." (Ken Olson, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.)

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." (Western Union internal memo, 1876.)

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" (David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.)

"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." (A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." (Bill Gates, 1981.)

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" (H M Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.)

"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper." (Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in Gone With The Wind.)

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." (Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.)

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." (Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.)

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." (Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M Post-It Notepads.)

"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." (Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.)

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." (Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.)

"Everything that can be invented has been invented." (Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.)

To accompany the abbreviated list of heroic failures - for there are many others not listed - there is quite properly a lucidly expressed canon that appears immediately hereunder.

(now freely translated as the researchers' Bill of Rights)

(Anon)

(I acknowledge with gratitude the efforts of an unknown academic at Brandon University, western Canada.)

Another trap that snares the unwise or naive futurist is the idea that progress should travel in a straight line or at least a seemingly clear linear manner. In other words, if the population is growing at a certain rate, it need not follow that it will continue with the same rate of growth. Also, there are periods of increased and decreased innovation.

During the life of Thomas Edison for example, there was a noticeable surge in innovation due largely to the contributions of Edison himself. Economic depressions impede innovation. Wars can either increase or decrease innovation depending on whether innovation is used by either side to gain an advantage or not. It is not unreasonable for us to expect a period of rapid innovation now since a new century (and millenium) is approaching.

People have a natural tendency to look forward to such milestones with the expectation of vast changes. We need only recall - well those interested in history might - the events which occurred at the turn of the last millenium, and we might speculate about what happens during January if our worst fears about the impact of Y2K are realised.

People will tend to work harder to bring changes about when they expect positive results. Also, technology is cumulative - the tools and methods of one generation being used to create the technology for the next generation. We now have a far richer store of technological tools and processes than we have ever had to apply toward our future innovations.

In assessing and addressing our individual and collective future, there may be a number of steps we might take - either individually or collectively - which do not constrain, but sensibly bound our otherwise unlimited imaginations.

In commentary which recently appeared on the internet Gipson Arnold has written:

What I will seek to do though, is ground my prognostications - such as they are - in the increasing array of material and thought which is available on the what, the why, the how and the when of the immediate future. Bearing in mind, that the role and function of education is often central but almost always implicit in some of what has been written or said, and that if even a small part of what is predicted comes to fruition, then the impact on education and on educational research will be quite profound.

The central premise described by Toffler and other futurist thinkers is that human history, while it is complex and contradictory, can be seen to fit patterns. The pattern Toffler has described takes the shape of three great advances or waves. Visually, most of us can readily imagine a succession of large waves rolling across the ocean and reaching the shore - metaphorically this is the substance of wave theory.

The first wave of transformation began when some prescient person about 10,000 years ago, probably a woman, planted a seed and nurtured its growth. The age of agriculture began, and its significance was that people moved away from nomadic wandering and hunting, and began to cluster into villages and develop more permanent cultures.

The second wave was an expression of machine power, the Industrial Revolution that began in the 18^th century and gathered steam after the mid 1800s. People began to leave the peasant culture of farming to come to work in city factories. This phase effectively culminated in World War II, with a clash of industrial juggernauts, and the explosion of the atomic bombs over Japan.

Just as the machine seemed at its most invincible, however, we began to receive intimations of a gathering third wave, based not on muscle but on mind. It is what we variously call the information or the knowledge age, and while it is powerfully driven by information technology, it has co-drivers as well, among them social demands world-wide for greater freedom and individuation. Among this third phase, education plays an increasingly important part, perhaps far more so than in the earlier manifestations when lives appeared rather less complex and change less evident or pressing.

It can be argued I think, that the information age discredits another industrial age principle articulated by Karl Marx. Power stems not from control of the means of production, but from influence over the means of consumption. That is to say: how products reach consumers and are put to use by them. A concomitant argument is that as our respective societies enter the information age, the real test lies not so much in industrial efficiency, but in the quality of life able to be provided for the citizens of the democracies in which we live.

In the first wave, wealth was land, and it was exclusive; if I grew rice, or wheat or whatever on my acres, you could not and nor could anyone else.

In the second, industrial wave, wealth diversified into three factors of production: land, labour, and capital. As with the rice paddy or the wheat field of the agrarian regime, each of these was discrete, allowing for only one use at a time.

To illustrate: in the industrial regime, General Motors, to name but one among many other companies became rich by combining its resources (its factories, its manpower, and its money) to make cars. Each car loaded on to the truck slightly drained the company of its resources.

Today's U.S. and possibly global counterpart to General Motors, Microsoft, makes cars that anyone can easily replicate at home (by copying disks). Microsoft is not drained of its resources when it ships a package of Windows 98, although the purchaser may very well be! The land, muscle, and money in Redmond, Washington, are not the source of the company's wealth; the knowledge of its software developers is.

Thus education moves from being rooted in institutions, many of which prepared people for jobs actually making or manufacturing things, equally often using physical labour to do so - to newer paradigms where education now prepares people for lives which increasingly involve thinking and the management of ideas.

Nicholas Negroponte has talked about this notion of the undiminishable resources of the information age. Atoms, Negroponte said, are dedicated in nature: they cannot be put to two uses simultaneously. Bits, the atomic equivalents in the cyber-world, upon which all digital information is based, are endlessly inter-changeable and re-usable. When you down-load a file, the file you down-loaded is still there.

Economics has been lovingly and improbably defined as the science of the allocation of scarce resources. From the standpoint of the third wave, in which the primary resource is knowledge, that second-wave definition now rings hollow. In the first place, economics may never have been much of a science, although there are many who would disagree. More to the point, our supply of knowledge is anything but scarce - it is seemingly inexhaustible and infinite, a veritable cornucopia, or more popularly a magic pudding. Some might also see it as something of a curate's egg, but that is not an issue to be addressed here.

Indeed, like paper money, which replaced but relied upon the backing of the tangible gold of the earlier waves, which has been replaced by alpha-numeric figures stamped on intrinsically worthless sheets of paper, our knowledge is inexhaustible.

One of the central themes of industrial regimes is centralisation and standardisation. Where the first wave lacked the technology to connect locale to locale, and to organise large systems, the second wave provided highways, cars, telephones, and main-frame computers, linking remote outposts to central controls. At the height of the second wave, everything was mass, from mass production to mass destruction to the mass media.

Both the Tofflers worked in factories when they were young, and they knew, as all factory workers of that era knew, that the job was to turn out the longest possible line of identical products. This was one point on which assembly-line capitalist Henry Ford and assembly-line Marxist Joseph Stalin could agree: the virtue of mass production. The larger the quantity, the cheaper the run.

But the economics of production - and other things as well - changed. Computers now make change-overs faster, more effective and less expensive. Computers embody features such as finite element analysis, computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing.

To be sure, the bureaucracy and pyramid power structure of the second wave made possible many wonderful things. Consumer goods streamed through factories at an unprecedented pace. Medicines, appliances, government services, and entertainment all found their way from production centres to every nook and market niche.

But the price of quality goods was very largely sameness. In the famous words of Henry Ford, They can have a car any color they like, so long as it's black. The completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1867 created a single trans-continental mega-market within the United States that would soon overwhelm every micro-market it passed through. Similar events took place in others among the then developing nations of Europe.

It is worth noting, however, that it took another 100 years or so for the same event to occur in Australia with the completion of a standard gauge rail link between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. An example of a federal system in which states rights were never more fully expressed in a way which impeded progress!

Consider how this applies to tertiary education for example, and as described by Wagner (1998).

In New Zealand, recognition and linkages are improving between different educational institutions; secondary schools now offer tertiary-level modules which polytechnics and universities may accept and credit towards their qualifications. In Australia, a few universities have absorbed within their institutional structures some technical and further education institutes (TAFE) which are not a formal part of the higher education system. There are also programmes being offered jointly by special training colleges and private universities in Japan.

The tyranny of the factory inspired a bleak futurism in which Big Brother ruled the planet through centralised information control. But something happened that seemingly prevented the nightmares of George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World from occurring. Technology took a sharp turn away from standardisation, and toward individuation and diversity. A question remains however about the extent to which Asimov's laws of robotic behaviour are yet to be tested.

In a not-always-pleasant way, the third wave began de-centralising the machine heart. Today is a time of transition, in which we witness the curious spectacle of massive second-wave-type enterprises adapting to the third-wave appetite for differentiation.

Take a common place example: coffee. I understand that in the United States in the 1920s, each town had its distinct coffee flavour. In the 1970s, it was Maxwell House and McDonald's scalding coffee, from sea to shining sea and across them as well to the ever lasting regret of many of us. By the 1990s, an explosion of family run coffee-houses took place across the United States and is gradually making its presence felt elsewhere too.

Today you stop, as someone with whom I am acquainted did recently, at a coffee shop in Alabama, and order a double latte of decaffeinated Kenyan with a finger of amaretto hazelnut syrup.

Or you can have the best of all worlds, second wave McDonald's standardisation, combined with third wave product choice, by walking into any of the 2,000 Starbucks coffee shops nation-wide - and soon to come to other parts of the new world and already in New Zealand.

In retailing, we have witnessed the second-wave juggernaut Wal-Mart in the United States, and to a lesser extent K-Mart in Australasia, break upon cities small and large, with the third-wave possibility of a single store selling 100,000 different items. And for those of you unaware of recent developments, to gain a toehold - well something anatomically rather more substantial - Wal-Mart recently acquired an entire British supermarket chain.

Again, the Tofflers have coined a term for a third-wave predicament, familiar to anyone who has surfed the Internet, shopped at a warehouse grocery store, or installed satellite down-load television: over-choice.

The clearest sign of changing politics is the decay of political parties. The day when a Bob Menzies or his equivalent can put together a string of election victories spanning some two decades, by combining a handful of voter blocs - farmers, labour, at least some of the intellectuals, the rural and the urban, into a single lasting coalition is gone. Election today requires stringing together hundreds of splintered grass roots groups: the non-smokers, AIDS activists, save-the-whales people, and what-have-you.

And if you doubt what I say is true, ask my colleagues from New Zealand about the influence of MMP, or from Australia about voting patterns in Australia's senate elections. Look also to Europe for the success of once radical parties such as the Greens in influencing electoral outcomes.

Remember though the injunction of the socialite, diarist, and pungent critic Dorothy Parker: You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.

Every group is passionate, and generally narrow in focus. It is in every way a more daunting process, and it is conducted, as making sausages should not be, in full view of the public. It is no wonder, that few if any, in the United States, in Japan, in Italy, or anywhere, believe in parties any more. Parties were a static second-wave, homogenised, massified function that do not seem relevant in the more volatile, diversified, heterogeneous third wave. How long before this translates more widely to the Australasian setting yet remains to be seen, but I think we can confidently predict that it will.

Again, to look at the application of "small p politics", tertiary education provides an illustrative example. As Wagner notes:

Writing about the epistemology of educational research, Walker and Evers (1997) note that:

Husen (1997) is among others who notes the propensity for apparent conflict between dominant research models. He writes:

Again, Walker and Evers argue that:

More recently, it has become fashionable in some quarters to simply attack conventional, particularly quantitative, research as either out-moded or inappropriate. Such attacks often appear to be far more firmly rooted in the discourse of polemic, or unsubstantiated opinion, than in a rational approach which actually and constructively criticises research methods and seeks alternative ways of undertaking investigation and enquiry.

My comments here, should not be read in any way as a continuation of, or support for, such un-informed or ill-informed attacks. Rather, they seek to establish at least some premises, through which we as a research community and/or individually, can view our activities through different lenses, and perhaps reach different and maybe even more informed conclusions.

Most, if not all of us, are quite familiar with the underlying principles of the scientific method. Taking a closer look, the essence of the scientific method is where a hypothesis is tested by experiment. That is:

• state the question;

• form a hypothesis;

• do experiments;

• interpret data and draw conclusions; and

• revise theory (go back to step 2).

Consider though whether we might take different approaches.

For some, objectivity has become not only an article, but faith itself - quite literally an ideology. I am moved to ask, however, whether there can be anything truly objective, given that everything is seen through a particular lens or point of view. Indeed, as we now know, even the once immutable laws of the natural sciences are giving way before the insights of Hawking, Davies, and others.

As far as faiths go, may I quote my colleague Leigh Montford, who wrote recently:

"Religion - a system to keep the masses

On the straight and narrow.

I'm happy to be an atheist -

Strolling along the crooked and wide."

I am also minded of the words written by de Chardin:

Moreover, while accepting the value and application of less subjective methodologies, including those firmly rooted in psychometrics and statistics, I wonder some times whether the underlying notion or a lineally ordered world does actually apply.

And while I see clear value in the assumptions which underpin descriptive and inferential statistics, on occasions I think that the world does not necessarily function orthogonally, but rather in curlicues and jagged patterns, interactively, holistically and on more than some occasions, quite randomly and absolutely without prediction.

We must be wary though because objectivity can be thought of as a faith. Both abandon control. Both consist of a renunciation of our personal involvement in the realisation of our expectations. Both are means of manifesting our beliefs, of projecting our pre-conceptions into our perception and experience, by disavowing the autonomous ego.

Perhaps it is true that objective scientists are just as faithful when they claim, we want the experiment to come out a certain way, but even more than that, we want to know how nature would have it come out. And so they suspend their conviction in this pre-conception by being objective. Both the faithful religious and the objective scientist remove from the actualisation of their desires, the barrier of their presumed autonomy, the presumed distance between themselves and the object of their desire. This objectivity, this faith, may make it more likely, not less, that the expectation will be realised.

It is not that the things we see and encounter do not exist. Rather the illusion is that their existence is separate and independent of our own. The distinction between internal and external, no matter how real it seems, may ultimately be arbitrary. The seemingly external world may be as native to us as who we are inside. And we can demonstrate this by manipulating the so-called external world with the most inward act of faith. Faith is the classic example of action at a distance.

Jacob Boehme perhaps said it best:

Also Goldsmith wrote:

Neither of these writers is very far away from the different sense of reality, the different sense of purpose and the different sense of outcomes, attainable by research methods rooted in different paradigms.

Do not mistake me though, I am not an advocate for the overthrow, violent or otherwise, of traditional and tested approaches to educational research.

But I feel we must be aware too of the dangers of falling into patterns like Stalin's Soviet Union where Lysenko dominated the then nascent science of plant genetics and did enormous damage not only to cereal crops as a result, but worse, to the millions who suffered because of his theories.

What I am arguing for are approaches to educational research which recognise the validity, applicability, and appropriateness of different pathways, paradigms, and behaviours. Increasingly, I would also want to argue that we need to accept a diversity of approaches, each bearing its own and external legitimation if we are to tackle the complex issues before us.

It is as well to remember too the advice provided to those working with the prize tool of the modern world - the computer which - also has clear application to educational and other forms of research.

It is also worth considering Newman's injunction which states:

It seems to me therefore, that in broad terms at least, there are three possible stances. The first recognises that there are different methods and approaches which are simply irreconcilable; incommensurable if you like. These are based on mutually incompatible, essentially competitive ways of researching the same issues or domains.

The second recognises that there may well be distinct paradigms which, although essentially irreconcilable or incommensurable, operate in a complementary manner. These are equally appropriate ways of attacking the same issue.

The third way - and no political reference is intended here - argues quite differently that various research methods cannot be grouped under irreconcilable or incommensurable paradigms; instead holding that the idea of such paradigms is mistaken and perhaps incoherent.

Those who support the unity thesis, which is embodied in the third option, generally hold that there is an essential harmony between different research traditions, stemming from their raison d'être. This is an elemental coherence deriving from the practical problems and issues to be addressed.

Such approaches also appear to posit a touchstone, which does not so much reconcile the irreconcilable, as accept different approaches and models.

Others among my colleagues, for example, Ella Henry and Russell Bishop, have argued far more compellingly than me for alternative research models or positions, which take account of different learning styles, different cultural approaches and different world views among Maori.

They have argued that essentially western European, objectivist research has clear limits for application and utility in settings where there are groups and individuals with profoundly different cultures and languages. More, that unified rather than fragmentary approaches, which recognise not only the cerebral-intellectual domain of the research, but the heart, culture and soul are important too, and are vastly preferable to others.

Bishop (1996) for example writes:

And goes on to say:

Smith (1992) phrases the issues and questions differently but with almost identical meaning:

Lest we think that changing paradigms and challenging established orthodoxies is new, perhaps we might consider the work of some scholars who have had quite profound effects on the manner in which we think and the manner in which we go about research and enquiry.

Early in the century Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's innovative course at Geneva over-turned the orthodox views of German philology and laid the basis for a new approach not just to linguistics, but to anthropology and sociology as well. De Saussure had been a part of that movement that launched the investigation of the Asiatic origins of European languages. The quest for the original Ur-language that united European languages with ancient Greek and Sanskrit was one that had gripped the imagination of German philologists like Adam Muller.

However, this programme, rich as it was, was also replete with political motivations that called its objectivity into question. The model of linguistic dissemination implied a hierarchy of races, with an Aryan superiority. The contest for national proximity to the Ur-language was a one for authenticity that diverged from a purely scientific investigation.

De Saussure's Course (Cours de linguistics géneral) does not reject outright the investigations of the philologists - many of these were real advances. What he does is to challenge some of the suspect methodological assumptions. So for example, the idea that languages that are closer to the original are in any way superior is rejected by him as unscientific. Furthermore, he demonstrates linguistic similarities do not necessarily arise from direct borrowing. Languages may be similar in structure of syntax and yet share no common origin or even influence.

But most pointedly, de Saussure rejects the positivist conception of language as one of simple correspondence to the physical world. Words, he says, exist primarily in relation to one another, before they exist in relation to an object. It is the relation of sign to the code of signification that accords it meaning, rather than a simple correspondence with an external object.

Again de Saussure shows through, looking at linguistic variation and innovation, that distinctions within the language have a knock-on effect upon other terms, tenses, prefixes, and so on, that means that any singular innovation necessarily impacts upon the whole code of language, or its structure (hence his linguistics are sometimes called structural). Here de Saussure was taking language out of the realm of logic, to look at language and its grammar as an object of study in its own right.

Let us also look to another linguist, Naom Chomsky who provides a further example of how and why we need to challenge, and where needed, over-turn established approaches to thinking, learning, and language.

Many of us recall that in the post war years, psychology which had a number of schools of thought, was profoundly influential across a range of social and educational domains. Behaviourism was effectively founded by Watson who first presented his ideas at psychological meetings between 1908 and 1912, and by 1912 was using the term behaviourist. The following year he published an article, "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It," that introduced this distinct new branch of psychology. It has often been called "the behaviourist manifesto".

"Psychology as the behaviorist views it," Watson wrote, "is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent on the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness."

The traditions established by Watson were continued quite passionately by B F Skinner, who developed the ideas of operant conditioning and shaping behaviour.

Unlike Pavlov's classical conditioning, where an existing behaviour (salivating for food) is shaped by associating it with a new stimulus (bell ringing), operant conditioning is the rewarding of a partial behaviour or a random act that approaches the desired behavior. Operant conditioning can be used to shape behaviour. If the goal is to have a pigeon turn in a circle to the left, a reward is given for any small movement to the left. When the pigeon catches on to that, the reward is given for larger movements to the left, and so on, until the pigeon has turned a complete circle before getting the reward.

Skinner compared this learning with the way children learn to talk -- they are rewarded for making a sound that is sort of like a word until in fact they can say the word. Skinner believed other complicated tasks could be broken down in this way and taught.

Skinner expressed no interest in understanding the human psyche. He was as strict a behaviourist as John Watson, and sought only to determine how behaviour is caused by external forces. He believed everything we do and are is shaped by our experience of punishment and reward. He believed that the "mind" (as opposed to the brain) and other such subjective phenomena were simply matters of language; they didn't really exist.

There is no doubt that Skinner's behaviourist approaches to teaching and learning had very considerable sway over educational thinking in the 1950s, and in other areas as well. Moreover, his arguments about the manner in which human beings learned language - in the form of stimulus and response - had quite widespread acceptance. In essence, Skinner's approaches told us that we learned language via mechanisms not unlike those employed in operant conditioning. Unsurprisingly, the idea of language acquisition, arising from innate pre-disposition had not occurred to him.

In the mid to late 1950s, however, Chomsky, then a student and very much a junior academic and at the beginning of what was to become a lengthy and profoundly influential career, wrote what was effectively a comprehensive rebuttal of Skinner's approach to language learning.

Chomsky argued that generative grammar provided a far better explanation of the manner in which humans acquired and used language. In particular he provided some of the core foundations for later, more extensive research which addressed differences between language acquisition - the innate pre-disposition of humans to acquire language in much the same way as they are pre-disposed to walk upright - and language learning which applies more usually and broadly to features such as reading and writing which are appropriately recognised as skills, or adults who are involved in becoming adept or otherwise in using a second or third language.

Significantly, Chomsky demonstrated quite comprehensively that if humans learned language in the manner supposed by Skinner rather than acquiring it - using operant conditioning or any other form of behaviourist approach for that matter - it would take any individual an inordinately long time to master even the simplest grammatical structures.

Further, Chomsky showed that each utterance or sentence - with some obvious formulaic exceptions - is generated anew and is thus a unique event.

It seems equally significant that Chomsky's work led to discoveries that most of us could discern quite early in our lives whether a sentence was grammatical or not, even when we didn't have a set of prescriptive rules to tell us why.

All of the languages used by human beings are capable of endless re-generation into distinctive forms - utterances or sentences. Grammatical structures, while seemingly straightforward to many of us, allow for a vast range of variation and individual application - for example in English, whether we use passive or active sentences, whether we insert subordinate or relative clauses, and whether we end sentences with prepositions.

While linear word order in English is important - sentences usually taking the subject-verb-object form - what is also significant is that most of us can recognise a sentence as grammatically correct even when it is semantically meaningless - in this universe anyway, to quote Chomsky's example green ideas sleep furiously. Thus there are over-riding events or circumstances which unite syntax and semantics and in spoken language phonology too, and which in concert create a unique utterance which we are able to discern.

Many people share the sense that the traditional nuclear family of the '50s, with working father and stay-at-home mother, is the best defense against the wrong kinds of changes in a society. The Australian Prime Minister John Howard apparently still believes this, as did Britain's Margaret Thatcher. But is it reasonable to expect that everything else in society will change, but the family unit will undergo no change?

Thus, we have the proliferation of family types today: the re-marrieds, the adopteds, the blended family, the single-parent family, the same-sex family, the zero-parent family, the family of convenience, the virtual family. Whatever we have, and whatever its faults, it's probably far better than the pater familias culture of ancient Rome.

No one particularly endorses the fracturing of the western family that has occurred in the past 30 years, but it is noted that it is of a piece with everything else that has happened i.e. it is now accepted fact and must be treated accordingly. To imagine that we might return to the simpler days of the nuclear family with a working male spouse, non-working wife, and two point something children is as illusory today as re-invoking the Roman notion of the pater familias. And probably about as desirable.

These premises are extended and canvassed in Lucy Smith's concluding remarks to the OECD High Level Conference, in October 1998, titled Changing labour markets and gender equality: the role of policy.

Centralised management made the world go round from the rise of the nation-state through World War II. In a simple system, a single individual could provide the wisdom and authority to guide a large enterprise - and the direction to go with the wisdom and authority. Parallels between business tycoons and medieval monarchs are by no means unusual and nor are comparisons in the manner in which they behaved.

Hardly anyone believes that anymore. The emphasis, since the 1970s at least, has been on de-centralisation, on delegation of authority and empowerment, on self-managing teams, on the leader-as-facilitator as opposed to the leader-as-god. As with the effective demise of absolute monarchies, so too there has been a democratisation of commerce and industry. Businesses are no longer like small nation states, secure behind borders and protected by natural features.

Running a large enterprise from a hub on the basis of a single person's competence is rather like a doctor making morning rounds and prescribing Prozac - or perhaps it should be Viagra - for everybody. You can't treat an entire economy, or even an entire organisation, with one medicine anymore. In the de-massified organisation of today, one-size-fits-all simply doesn't work.

Diversity and change are key. Every leader should check for the novelty ratio on the organisation's product offerings: how many are six months old or less versus five years old or more? The same can be applied to people: how many have arrived in the past six months, versus those who have been around five years or longer?

How old are any organisation's existing managerial practices? When was the form you are now holding in your hand last changed? How might it be improved? I'll concede though, that for some of you working in some universities, the degree of ossification remains high.

In every company new ideas, new products, and new people are waiting to be born. The leader's task is to get them out and breathing.

It sometimes seems that in the competitive third wave, you must be a rocket scientist to survive. But increasingly we are beginning to see the current era as one in which Gardner's multiple intelligences, and/or other models are finally identified and given their due.

In the third wave, good ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. It does not behove management or any of us in more powerful roles, to treat simplistically, people who are supplying the native wit that allows organisations to succeed. This is made readily apparent in Ryback's Emotionally Intelligent Management.

Conventionally smart people without motivation or energy or good health generally tend not to amount to much. Indeed, reducing a person's gifts to an IQ number is a kind of ultimate unintelligence, or at least classification, but about what you might expect of a second-wave educational system that still sees teaching as a factory activity and young human beings as products to be processed.

Unfortunately, we still see far more than the vestiges of this approach in the over-simplified pronouncements made from time to time, harking back to some golden age of literacy and numeracy when people more accurately knew their place and their assigned roles in the world.

I seem to recall a poet once writing about this very issue and offering formal confirmation of the order and placement of the Almighty, archangels, angels, humanity and animals, including some fairly direct references to the peasants knowing their place.

The new intelligence will be all over the place. It may mean courage, imagination, entrepreneurial skills, warmth, organisational ability, or simply the ability to survive in oppressive or perilous circumstances. These are the kinds of brains that will thrive in the third wave. Reduction of human intelligence, no matter how measured, to a bell curve might be considered a gross over-simplification of reality.

Future Shock was published in 1971. The Tofflers saw the knowledge age as an out-growth of the industrial age that would require only a bit of fine-tuning; they now see it as more revolutionary than that. The regime of the belching chimneys has been toppled forever. What remains is still frothing and changing its shape. It is a whole new era, with dangers and opportunities uniquely its own.

First, let me begin with something of an injunction. Kanter (1997) has written:

There are various time periods for studying the future, which were outlined by Earl Joseph of the Minnesota World Future Society Chapter. These periods are:

• Near Term Future: up to one year from now.

• Short Range Future: one to five years from now.

• Middle Range Future: five to twenty years from now.

• Long Range Future: twenty to fifty years from now.

• Far Future fifty plus years from now.

Most individuals, as well as most businesses and governments, only look ahead as much as four to five years in their planning - in politics until the next election and that seldom involves more than three years at best - and in business through the next five years. It is important to look further ahead, however, in a world undergoing such rapid change today. Joseph stresses that we are creating the world that we will be living in from five to 20 years ahead (the Middle Range Future) by what we are doing right now. Thus almost anything can be created - if we have a vision of what we want to create and are also committed personally to that vision - in five to twenty years from now.

Some critics bemoan the sweep of historic change and wish it could be blocked. And not only critics, there are politicians in many nations, not just Australasia, who would willingly turn back the clock to some mythical golden age of stasis and well-being. Within education that is neither feasible nor desirable.

Around the world, even casual observation suggests that there is a remarkably ubiquitous educational system which works well for some and poorly for others. The Castor and Pollux of elitism and class bias are seemingly global, a structural feature of the educational system built over the past four centuries and perhaps longer.

Educators designed the traditional system to make optimal use of a powerful information technology, that of printed text. In our extended present, the means of communication available to educators are changing rapidly, and educators are now having to determine what they will accomplish with those changing conditions.

Throughout educational efforts up until the current historic juncture, the problem of policy has been to deploy and allocate scarce information and educative resources. This condition is shifting in the extended present in which we live.

What we see now with the World Wide Web is a hint at the fullness of cultural participation that is becoming the birthright of each and every child. Educational policy as it has existed has been a complicated system for allocating differential access to the cultural assets of the world's civilisations and for legitimating the results. Soon, educational policy will need to be re-defined to take into account a completely novel starting point -- all the resources of the world's cultures will in principle be available to any person at any place at any time.

A movement from the pole of constraint towards its opposite is having profound effects on the formation of curricula. Traditionally, curricular resources in schools represent highly constrained choices and policies determining who teaches what to whom, and how measures assessing the resultant performances by students, teachers, and schools all serve to manage and legitimate such constraints.

Such policies result in tenaciously powerful and, some would argue inappropriate judgments of cultural worth as educators have had to rationalise a cramped canon and a sample of historical interpretations that have been simplified sometimes to the point of stupidity or absurdity. In field after field, the range of cultural resources that have substantial educative worth has far exceeded what publishers could cram into textbooks or schools could purchase for their libraries. Thus, the great paradox arose that, except at its most elite pinnacles, education has been a consistently anti-intellectual profession.

In constructing a new educational system, centering initiative and control with the student seems a fundamental principle of design and a measure of good practice. The role of teachers remains great: it is the role of fomenting questions, doubts, uncertainties; modelling strategies of inquiry; and criticizing the quality of results. In this context, curriculum design becomes the art of posing problems and facilitating work upon them. To so facilitate autonomous work by students requires great skill and sensibility, and teaching may become a more prized and demanding profession.

The transformation of education which needs to take place, and which may very well take place, is not a function of increased access to information. It is a function of increased participation in intellectual work - in advancing knowledge, in applying skill, in exercising judgment.

As someone whose first encounters with higher education involved language and linguistics, areas which have continued to intrigue me and gain my personal and professional attention for 25 years or so, I often look to words and their meanings to provide some contexts for what is to be discussed.

This is what I have done here, but only in a small measure, and certainly not in any attempt to belabour a particular point. However, there are advantages to be gained by occasionally re-visiting what some of us might term first principles. Or in the words of some commentators who choose to write about educational issues - getting back to the basics!

And it is as well to remember Blake's injunction in the late 1700s, that: "The true method of knowledge is experiment.".

Let us begin with the term research for example. Macaulay wrote that: "The dearest interests of parties have frequently been staked on the results of the researches of antiquaries.".

The etymology of the word seems to have derived from Old French recerche, or the French, recherche, meaning diligent inquiry or examination in seeking facts or principles; laborious or continued search after truth; as, researches of human wisdom.

Alternatives or synonyms taken from the Oxford and from Roget's include: investigation; examination; exploration; enquiry; scrutiny; and study. Related words include: hunt; quest; search; seek; look; pursuit; and inquest.

Research is a detailed study of a subject or an aspect of a subject. When you do research, you collect and analyse facts and information and try to gain new knowledge or new understandings. It is accordingly, a systematic investigation into and study of materials, sources or whatever, in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions and it might embrace work directed towards innovation, introduction or the improvement of products or services.

Spenser wrote that: "To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge.".

The etymology of the word education seems to derive from the Latin educatio, or French. éducation, being the act or process of educating; the result of educating, as determined by the knowledge, skill, or discipline of character, acquired; also, the act or process of training by a prescribed or customary course of study or discipline; as, an education for the bar or the pulpit; he has finished his education.

Alternatives or synonyms for education include: knowledge; cognisance, cognition, acquaintance, experience, ken, insight, familiarity; comprehension, apprehension; recognition; appreciation intuition; conscience, consciousness; perception, pre-cognition; light, enlightenment; glimpse, system of knowledge, body of knowledge; science, philosophy, theory, aetiology.

Related words and terms include: erudition, learning, lore, scholarship, reading, letters; literature; book madness; book learning, information, general information; store of knowledge teaching culture, attainments; acquirements, acquisitions; accomplishments; proficiency; practical knowledge and skill, deep knowledge, the march of intellect; progress of science, advance of science and advance of learning.

Thus, by but extrapolation and understanding, if nothing else, we are better able to see what research in education involves, the directions it might pursue and the worth of any output or outcome.

But what might we focus on? Perhaps some ideas such as those proposed not so very long ago, and which to some may have appeal. Travis for example, suggests that:

One issue which emerges, if not by design then certainly by default, is the need to address important political and economic questions which attend the business of education.

There is little doubt that the schools and teachers and students, engaged in the work of education, constitute a market for the sale of various goods - food, books, clothes, pens and pencils, furniture, fuel, rings, electronics, and software. Thus, students and teachers are literally consumers who either individually or collectively make some decisions about their purchasing and other choices.

Education as such, however, is not inherently a market, with success measured in market share and the relative efficiency in making and distributing product. Others have argued that education - whether in schools, vocational education and training or higher education - is in fact a quasi market, to which normal market disciplines do not apply. In part, this approach is governed by the underlying rationale that choices are largely being made - where there are any at all - using public rather than private resources.

As a human phenomenon, education is not a market for products, but a process of growth and transformation, one sustained over many years with success measured throughout the vicissitudes of personal and collective experience. While this notion may be anathema to some current commentators, and even more so to some bureaucrats and politicians, its value must be re-asserted if we are not to lose the intrinsic value of education and see it simply rendered as yet another commodity.

It is also worth recalling that many a fool has emerged from a richly financed education, and many others have earned hard wisdom through a sparse regimen of study.

In positing both questions and observations about educational research, it is worth also bearing in mind some of the circumstances which we will encounter in the not so very far future. Let us take, for example, the issue of life extension as but one context.

In the age of the Roman Empire, the average person lived to be 22. In the Dark Ages, 40 was old. By 1900, 47 was a senior citizen. Today, 76 is the average life span. Thanks to replacement body parts, anti-aging drugs, and genetic implants, people born in the year 2000 can expect to live past 80 -- and be healthy, happy, and energetic. People born after 2050 CE may live as long as the Bible says people lived in 2050 BCE -- 150 years or more. To which we might add: what a frightening thought!

What strikes me as important, is that the traditional life cycle pattern of three distinct periods - education, employment, and retirement - has become obsolete. In recognising that it is obsolete, we need also to have regard for the consequences which flow from this change. Not only from our personal perspective as human beings who are going to be actively involved, but from our professional perspective as educators and researchers, for whom these changes will make marked and lasting differences.

For example, within this context, we already know that in New Zealand in 1998, 12 per cent of the population were aged 65 or older. By 2031, this will have more than doubled to 25 per cent of the population. It is also recognised that females predominate in the older age groups. I would be very surprised to learn that Australia, or any industrialised, western nation was significantly different. In fact, a recent OECD report "Maintaining prosperity in an aging society" makes this abundantly clear.

Interestingly, none of the seven-point plan advanced by the OECD to deal with issues attending an aging population, specifically addresses the role and function of education, nor the place of educational research within this vastly different future which faces us. This plan provides the following objectives.

What social and other changes already occurring suggest is that in the next millenium - whether it begins on the populist 1 January 2000, or 1 January 2001:

• there will be an increasingly larger proportion of the population found among older persons;

• changes in technology and the nature of work have made it broadly more cerebral than physical;

• there is a recognisable shift in the western, industrialised economies towards occupations that require higher levels of skill and/or creativity;

• non-standard, part-time and casual employment is becoming more the norm than it has at any time in our recent history;

• despite current trends, it seems likely that in the not too distant future, all of us may have access to increased leisure or non-remunerated time; and

• work-place structures themselves are becoming flatter and less hierarchical with decreased pressure to retire and make way for others.

Peter Drucker, the noted futurist thinker and writer, in a speech not so very long ago said:

Drucker also spoke about demographic upheavals in the following terms.

The unavoidable implication of this shift is that future politics will be decided by a group of old people who produce nothing and use up much of their societies' resources. Consider the research implications of that!

Drucker believes we will have to raise retirement age, to 75 or even higher, and that the nature of retirement will change. Expect people in the next century to phase in and out of retirement. And why not? They will be in better shape than 75-year-olds of this era, and will have great job mobility from having worked in many positions and places in their careers. (The World According to Peter Drucker, 27 January 1998, Masters' Forum, United States)

More recently, The Economist (25 September 1999) reported under the head line "Too many or too few", that:

The Delors report, commissioned by UNESCO, explains that education is at the heart of both personal and community development; its mission is to enable people, without exception, to develop all their talents to the full. In acknowledging tensions between the global and the local, competition and equality of opportunity and long-term and short-term considerations facing educational policy makers, the report calls for a broad concept of education that is pursued throughout life - flexible, diverse, and available at different times and in different places.

The Delors report outlines four pillars of education:

• learning to know;

• learning to do;

• learning to live together, learning to live with others; and

• learning to be.

These pillars reflect the changing nature of society in the late 1990s, where there is a continuing need to upgrade and update skills throughout the lives of all people. Learning to know encapsulates the need to understand your environment, to live in dignity, to develop occupational skills, and to communicate. Learning to do, as the Delors report suggests, appears initially to be more closely linked to vocational education and training; however it is by no means exclusive and certainly captures much of higher education and other elements of non-formal education within its ambit.

Learning to live together is a theme increasingly touched upon in national and international developments in education. Some would remember the issue of team-work, co-operation, and collaboration appearing in the competencies developed under the auspices of Australia's Mayer Committee perhaps a decade ago now. This theme also re-emerges and is embedded in aspects of the eight learning areas endorsed by Australia's ministers of education, and is central to the work on civics education and values education which have gained national prominence in recent years.

Learning to be gains recognition again in the work on civics education and values education, and is implicit in much of the teaching and learning that occurs in higher education, and in vocational education and training.

Learning to know and learning to do, go well beyond traditional education and training opportunities, however, which have tended to concentrate on knowledge and skills or competencies, to include innovation and adaptation of learning to future work environments. In the rapidly changing conditions of the information age, with its emphasis on new technologies, learning to know and to do supports the ability of individuals to constantly re-engage in training and education and must be a force for consideration in educational institutions and policy.

Changing workplaces have also placed more importance on qualities of communication, working with others, and managing and resolving conflict. In this context learning to live together, with its emphasis on the development of co-operation, participation, and an understanding of shared or common purpose with other members of society, becomes critical. Finally these processes come together in learning to be, which acknowledges the continuing nature of personal development within the broader context of a socially cohesive society.

The promotion of skill acquisition and lifelong learning is central to both the economic and social cohesion of the country. As Professor Colin Power, Assistant Director General of Education with UNESCO in Paris, suggested in a presentation in January, the greatest threat to people's security today comes from within countries, not from outside them. The Delors report states (1996:54):

This is nowhere more apparent than in an article which appeared in the OECD OBSERVER by Donald J. Johnston, Secretary-General, titled: "Lifelong learning for all":

A commitment to new approaches to learning is not without its risks and mountains to climb. But increasingly governments are making judgments that these risks ought to be incurred and the mountains scaled. In New Zealand for example, there is a White Paper which supports universal entitlement through unlimited access to post-compulsory education and training.

Further, a recent British Green Paper which sets out a vision for post-compulsory education and training notes "Lifelong learning means the continuous development of the skills, knowledge and understanding that are essential for employability and fulfilment". This Green Paper, The Learning Age: a renaissance for a new Britain, is based on the following principles:

• investing in learning to benefit everyone;

• lifting barriers to learning;

• putting people first;

• sharing responsibility with employers, employees and the community;

• achieving world class standards and value for money; and

• working together as a key to success.

One lesson that should be learnt from examples of best practice is that in continuing any society's Learning Revolution attention must be a focused on two key areas:

• the implementation issues of today, and

• the ability to look to the future and prepare for that.

As educators though, we must always be mindful of the purposes with which we are engaged and the rationales which appear to underpin our education systems.

Interesting and insightful commentary on this issue is provided by the Marianne Durand-Drouhin, Phillip McKenzie and Richard Sweet article "Opening pathways from education to work".

The first challenge is understanding what the future may hold. In the domain of high technologies, we are increasingly faced with real or virtual innovations in areas such as those listed below.

• Computers, telecommunications, and robotics, which together largely comprise the first stage of the information revolution.

• The new interactive, multi-media, Internet, World Wide Web, virtual reality technology stage of the information revolution.

• Genetic engineering, recombinant DNA, and gene splicing.

• Space exploration, industrialisation, and settlement.

• Nanotechnology.

• Work is also proceeding apace on appropriate or intermediate technologies, which are increasingly tied to sustainable development, living in harmony with nature, and voluntary simplicity.

• And changes in work-place developments, including new management styles; employment and job trends; technology and work; increasing diversity; and women working, to name but a few.

Prediction anticipates what will happen in the future. Observation notes what is happening in the present, a present which may extend from the recent past, through the immediate now, to well into the future. Let us observe three things that are happening around us at a rapid pace in our extended present.

First, people are converting all the contents of all the world's cultures to digital form, making the results available to any person at any place at any time.

Second, people are gaining flexible command of multiple ways to represent information, simulate interactions, and express ideas, extending the reach of intelligence, altering the spectrum of civilised achievement, and lowering thresholds to cultural participation.

Third, people are externalising diverse basic skills - to calculate, to spell, to remember, to visualise, to compare, to select - into the digital tools with which they work, making practical mastery of such skills, once an outcome of education, increasingly a given at its outset. As these changes become evident in practice all around, educators sense that the spectrum of pedagogical possibility alters significantly.

However, the escalating rate of change makes prediction no easy task. Shifts that are already apparent and that give an indication of the future include the move to knowledge based economies, the increasing importance of the service sector, down-sizing and the growth in casual and part-time employment (Delors, 1996; ACIRRT, 1999).

Historically, education and training systems and the institutions within them have been built around the notion of a traditional worker, employed full-time with one employer. Mention has already been made that this is now very much an out-moded concept, which already has major implications for the ways in which education is organised.

Over the recent past, the reforms in vocational education and training and higher education have worked to try and ensure that systems and the institutions within them keep pace with changes in employment arrangements. The extent to which this will bear upon schools is as yet largely untested. If we are to continue to be successful in building on existing reform processes, we must ensure that new forms of labour flexibility do not result in decreasing amounts of education and training or less commitment to securing Australasia's future skills base.

In an environment with rising numbers of non-traditional workers, for example self-employed or casual workers, a new mix of competencies, such as those demanded in knowledge-based or service industries, may also take on increasing importance.

Given this context of change, along with the massive expansion of the electronic economy and the uncertainty as to what jobs will look like in the future, lifelong learning is central to a nation's ability to achieve a highly skilled community responsive to the needs of industry and the world of work.

The future challenge, which we face in education and training in Australia, in New Zealand, as in other nations, is the challenge of making education in the broad - and skill acquisition and lifelong learning - national priorities.

Consider too, the changes which have occurred and which continue to occur in tertiary education and are cited in Wagner's "Re-defining tertiary education".

To address these imperatives, we must all develop the ability to listen, rather than talk.

Among the things which our respective societies need to address are to:

• expand the view of education and within it vocational education and training, to embrace the many and diverse ways that people, young and old alike, will choose to engage in skill acquisition and lifelong learning;

• reduce or remove the obstacles to access, participation and attainment - location, time, length and relevance of courses, physical layout, adequate facilities, and so on; and

• envisage and build more effective and efficient links and paths between each of the education sectors, recognising that there is no notional or actual hierarchy of school, vocational education and training, and higher education.

The Learning Revolution demands new and innovative responses at global, national, and local levels. Given the rate of change and the pace at which new technologies are changing the educational landscape, the Learning Revolution means that now more than ever, it is imperative that both national and local levels work together to understand and develop viable and effective policy and practice.

While none of us can afford not to be competitive or to be complacent in the face of global shifts, there are also strong reasons why effective, responsive, and learning institutions must and will continue to be a mainstay of the provision of quality education and training in Australasia as elsewhere.

To embrace the Learning Revolution will require our personal and professional commitment to quality and excellence, responsiveness to the community and the ability to think and act rapidly when necessary but certainly strategically in the face of swift transformations and increased global and local competition.

A national vision for education and training in the context of the Learning Revolution is to enable those responses and in turn to be responsive. In doing so, society will be able to create an education and training system and institutions within in that others envy because they support international competitiveness, enhance social cohesion, and cater for the diversity of our peoples.

High-speed wide-area networks linking ubiquitous computers to copious digital libraries can and will increasingly transform the cultural conditions under which educational interactions take place.

Traditionally, the school and the classroom have been places where teachers and students are isolated from the general culture and where information and ideas have been relatively scarce - the textbook is a meagre selection of what a field of knowledge comprises, a skilled teacher is a bundle of ignorance relative to the sum of learning, and a school library a sparse collection at best.

Networks reaching through the school into the classroom and to the desktop are ending the isolation and substituting a rule of abundance for that of scarcity. Such a new rule is not without its pitfalls, but to cope with these we must recognise that it is a new rule, deeply different from the old. In our extended present, the educational problem changes profoundly, shifting from stratagems for disbursing scarce knowledge to finding ways to enable people to use unlimited access to the resources of our cultures.

New media alter the ways of knowing and the opportunities for participating in the creation of knowledge. Multi-media, and its extension in virtual reality, is not merely a glitzy vehicle for edutainment hype. It is an epistemologically interesting development in our culture. For the most part, the work of thought has seemed located primarily in the manipulation of language, with mathematics and logic through their formal symbolisation seen as extensions of more everyday linguistic forms. Multi-media make it increasingly evident that the work of thinking can take many forms - verbal, visual, auditory, kinetic, and blends of all and each.

Of course, it is not the case that non-linguistic media are themselves new. Rather their status as serious means for creating knowledge is rising considerably. Knowledge consists primarily of cultural resources that people can store and retrieve on demand, as the need for it arises. Written, especially printed, media have long had a privileged place in education because they were easy to store and retrieve to suit the needs of users. Work in other media tended to exist in performances and monuments, which did not suit the strategies of random access.

Multi-media changes that condition. It subjects a far wider range of communications to the full rule of random access, changing the repertoire of resources that people can store and retrieve effectively and use on demand to serve the needs of disciplined thought and enquiry. People can use digital media both to acquire ideas and to express their thoughts in these diverse ways. As a result, educators will find it increasingly difficult to favor the linguistic modality over all others and they will need to broaden the norms of academic excellence.

Digital technologies expand personal potentialities. Distributed processing and ubiquitous computing may or may not aggregate into artificial intelligence in the strong sense, creating a species of machines that think in a significant way. But they are clearly coming to function as a means for augmenting intelligence with respect to our human intellectual skills.

Word processors warn of anomalous spellings as they occur; spreadsheets allow anyone to perform complex calculations quickly and accurately; and data-bases permit those with good memory or bad to manage information sets that neither could handle on their own. All sorts of more specialised tools greatly lower the skill levels needed to participate effectively in wide ranges of cultural activity. Precision and exactness may become trivial proficiencies because getting it right will be easy, provided one doesn't get it wildly wrong through some accidental error.

With regard to such accidental, but sometimes very portentous error, the ability to estimate and guess approximate results, traditionally an educationally suspect knack, becomes an increasingly prized skill. Thus, educators are sensing that changes in information technologies can deeply transform the hallmarks of having acquired a decent education. Established answers to the question - What knowledge is of most worth? - may not obtain under the conditions of learning and knowing that emerge with the digital augmentation of human intelligence.

As educators experience changes in the communications constraints, they understand that these developments open the existing educational system to new possibilities. Individual educators may or may not welcome that condition, but critic and evangelist alike sense that the new conditions open things to significant change. The new conditions, however, do not determine what will emerge. Educators are determining what emerges through the social construction of digital learning communities. Educational structures from kindergarten through to graduate schools and adult education are increasingly in flux. Structures are wrenching open to change; but the course that change can and should take must be determined through the interplay of effort by many different groups. To understand such an inter-play let us reflect on the dynamics of social construction.

Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are formed and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their cubs into form.

What the ideas advanced earlier might suggest, at least in very broad terms, is more diverse approaches to educational research which recognise the end of explicit boundaries between education, training, work - casual, part-time, paid and/or unpaid - and retirement.

Changing circumstances also suggest that the relative distribution of the population between those in full-time education as we understand it today, those in work, and those doing other things, will have been transformed irreversibly.

More, there are important social and educational research questions which flow from or are related to demographic changes. For example:

Of course, there are many attendant research questions involving the pre-service and in-service preparation of teachers and other educators who will be dealing with students and environments very different from those found today.

Is it possible to sustain the idea of full-time teacher training programmes - whether in their entirety such as many BEd courses, or end on with transition from typical BA/BSc routes to teaching? And if so, just how will such programmes prepare students entering the profession in the third millenium?

Already we are seeing increased use of work-place learning in all sorts of industries and enterprises - sometimes conducted or facilitated by trainers rather than teachers, self-paced and computer-managed learning where students are in almost full control of their own progress and assessment, and ever larger numbers of students using information technology to gain access to educational and training opportunities across state and national boundaries at competitive costs.

Such alternative approaches appear unlikely to simply go away; rather they appear far more likely to increase in number, diversity, and extent, particularly with the advent of ever cheaper and accessible technology.

In recent decades, educators seem to have relied heavily on linear flow models for improving educational practice. Such models make most sense in managing large-scale civil engineering projects or the development of new or improved products for a variety of mass markets. Researchers discover, be it by serendipity or system, valuable properties or techniques. Developers prepare them for the market, ensuring that they are tested and validated for performance, safety, and cost. Management allocates capital to the innovation and develops both production lines and distribution channels.

Aroused by advertising, the public finds itself enjoying the benefits of nylons, scotch tape, and Viagra. Variations on this theme of linear application abound -- a causal flow moves from the origination of an idea to its elaboration in a plan that provides the specifications controlling the work of implementation, which in turn is followed by the evaluation of results through market returns or stipulated performance measures. This model has great simplicity and people use it to describe diverse forms of activity in technology, science, medicine, industry, government, war, and education.

Albeit simple, this model is not always sound. Historians of technology have been finding more intricate models necessary to make sense of the way that complex technical systems develop. Contemporary telecommunications has not arisen through a simple linear flow from Alexander Graham Bell's patent for the telephone. As a technical system, the telephone required many different people, working at different times and places through different organisations, to solve many different technical problems. It resulted through a distributed accomplishment by diverse people and groups who understood the technical potentials of an emergent telephone system in similar, parallel ways.

Further, the emergence of the telephone as a social system required all sorts of people to form understandings of how to integrate use of it into the daily conduct of their lives. Some uses worked, others did not. Slowly, from many trials and differentiated actions, the telephone developed as a system in use from an odd device to a ubiquitous resource in all aspects of everyday life.

Virtually every major innovation arises through such many-sided efforts. Confronting such complexities, historians of technology are increasingly displacing the model of linear flow with one of social construction, using the latter to show how major developments arise from independent actions by numerous people, with those actions cohering into a significant development because they are based on shared understandings of the potentialities implicit in the historical processes under way.

In deciding what to do with changing conditions, educators will engage in the social construction of a new educational system, one that will come about through a diversity of innovations taken here and there by people and groups that share, to varying degrees, a common understanding of what potentialities arise in their world of practice with the new technologies. This proposition may sound amorphous, but it will, if we stick with it, lead to a clear sense of what is to be done.

Let us remember Aristotle's wise caution to seek "precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the phenomena admits." The class of things here in question is the shared comprehension of possibilities arising through the use of information technology in education. We aim to grasp those possibilities in thought and action. In preparation, let us first separate ourselves from two frequent misunderstandings of them.

A common response to changing conditions, whether in education or other domains, is one of passive reaction that arises with the failure to perceive that any new possibilities arise with the changes. The classic instance of this reaction was the way in which early printers crafted books that looked exactly like illuminated manuscripts. Passive reactions attach a timeless necessity to arrangements that are historically contingent. Passive reaction by educators amount to an inert effort to employ new information technologies to make the existing educational system work better, without significant changes in the structural features of that system. This course is fraught with ironies.

Applying new technologies to current procedures, expecting them to work better but to remain essentially unchanged, does not lead to significant improvements. Rather, it forces fundamental change from within, without providing a vision of where that change should lead. In this way, educators risk being caught unawares in a cascade of unexpected innovation. We can do better in our extended present by recognising that the task facing educators is to reconstruct the whole system in ways that will allow it to use new communications resources to overcome the inherent, structural deficiencies of the current system.

To grasp the opportunities inherent in changing conditions, educators need to adopt an active course based on their sense of potentiality for education, but they cannot overly plan that course.

The second misunderstanding lies in a compulsion to be unduly specific about the possibilities. As we have implied above, reconstruction of the whole educational system is a supremely complicated process, one that will not come about by promulgating a neat plan and implementing it straight away. As a human experience, education is both an intensely personal process that unfolds over 20 years or more of an individual's life and a ubiquitous social operation that involves billions of persons the world around.

It is so impossibly complicated that educators cannot conceptually plan or predictably implement a re-constructed system. They can, however, shape an emerging system over time, effectively constituting key features of it through a process of social construction, if they develop a concerted sense of shared directions. Coherent historical change wells up from many different acts that move parallel in time, spontaneously co-ordinating around an understanding of possibilities, at once emergent yet shared.

Educators will best define the pedagogical opportunities arising with changing conditions by concerted independent actions, by developing shared understandings and purposes, by crafting a new common sense of where they stand and what they can do.

New information technologies are opening the system to new possibilities as surely as new building technologies did to architecture some hundred years ago. But the technologies do not design new practices for us.

People, acting in the face of uncertainty, must determine what they can make of these emerging possibilities. Many groups and interests, pursuing many divergent inspirations, are vying for command, and a kaleidoscope of coalitions establish, through a diversity of initiatives, emerging norms of practice. Do people working in intellectual institutions and knowledge industries - the world's schools, colleges, universities, research laboratories, libraries, museums, and professional offices - share a sustained agenda with which to shape newly emerging educational practices?

Increasingly, education in the broad will follow the technology into new fields. Computer-driven learning methods are shifting the emphasis in the management of vocational education and training from buildings and books towards computers and connections. Web-based information offers people greater flexibility and access. In the recent past, governments in the industrialised nations have funded research into delivery technologies, product development, and staff development around flexible delivery.

This kind of technology means that more and more learning experiences can be accessed from providers, including overseas providers, via computer technologies. So, the pressure is on institutions to look to new, innovative ways of helping the workforce learn.

As yet, providers are venturing only into experimental and limited translations of programs into on-line delivery. The market may be about ready, but there are few products.

To capture the market, institutions will need to have well-developed systems and products available to support a range of delivery options. They will need to market these options through a range of media, including the Internet. They will need to increasingly export their programs through delivery on-line.

New forms of delivery make professional development for teachers an even greater priority than before. Teachers may need to practise their craft differently - for example they might be facilitators, coaches, providers of on line user support or traditional instructors. Since teachers will be taking on more diverse roles, and because the skills they need to be teaching are constantly changing, it is essential that teachers get the professional development they need to be valued by clients.

Other forces of change include changes in the characteristics of workers, changes in the management of work, and changes in where work is available. There is movement towards an older, more mobile workforce, in which women are increasing their participation. There is also continued growth in part-time work and contract work, self-employment, and out-sourcing. There is increasing employment in service and knowledge-based industries with less emphasis on primary, manufacturing, and other resource-based industries.

According to recent studies, work-place components are now found in around 60 per cent of Australian degree courses, and in 1996, over 250,000 students completed such components. Work undertaken in this way typically accounts for between one-eighth and one-quarter of the total marks and grades of degree programmes across Australia.

Real examples of work-place learning are seen in the recent compact between the AMP Society and the University of Technology - Sydney, which will provide programmes tailored to the needs of industry employees, and will be based on work within the particular enterprise. Employees will be able to complete a post-graduate qualification linked to AMP and individual needs.

Elsewhere, similar programmes exist for the Woolworths group where employees can undertake training from certificate to post-graduate master's degrees tailored to retailing and inclusive of significant on-the-job learning.

If the agenda, sketched in the pages above, approximates the historic task of social construction required in building a new educational system enabled by digital technologies, then we see that we are at most at the beginning of this effort that spans our extended present. The technological part is the easy part. The work of educational innovation stretches before us with demanding challenges.

We must consider, at least in part whether we face uncertainty or ambiguity? Uncertainty is where we don't have the facts we need to make a decision; ambiguity is where we have the facts, but are not sure what they mean, or where they might lead us.

And lest you think I was earlier too harsh on Skinner, allow me not to quote: "Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten". (New Scientist, May 1964)

Re-new the progressive contract with posterity by using new tools to pursue historically challenging goals - achieving the fulfillment of basic human rights; securing physical well-being in a sustainable global environment for all; eliminating prejudice, poverty, despair, and disease.

Shift the central concern in cultural and education policy from limited access to open participation, displacing the long-standing politics of exclusion with a vibrant, many-sided politics of inclusion.

Affirm the importance of independent inquiry and study as the engine of education, de-emphasising the traditional dominance of instruction.

Re-design relationships between early childhood, school education, and higher education with an integrated intellectual environment active at all levels, engaging all as creative participants in the cultural enterprise.

Develop a demonstration that new educational possibilities can address the intractable problems of the old system on a scale sufficient to change public expectations.

Create learning communities as the new milieu of practice where people meet face-to-face and via video conference, with people of mixed ages and interests engaged together in the effort of learning, supported by each other, by complete digital libraries, by open wide-area networks, and by powerful tools of analysis, synthesis, and simulation.

This extension to learning communities is a critical one. In recent years, literature on management with institutions and corporations has addressed the need for them to become learning organisations. This dictum applies no less to those working within research, or to the wider society we are helping to foster and create.

Thus research - well good research anyway - might be characterised by the same sorts of approaches spoken about by Charles Handy. A learning organisation - or society - is one that both learns and encourages learning in people. It creates space for people to question, think, and learn; and constantly re-frames the world and their part in it. To be effective, learning organisations and learning societies have to have formal ways of asking questions, of seeking out theories, and reflecting on them.

Most importantly, members of organisations and societies -particularly those charged with research and inquiry - must be encouraged to challenge traditional ways of doing things and to suggest improvements.

In closing my address, allow me to quote Robert Reich, a noted American scholar and formerly Secretary of Labour in the Clinton administration. Speaking about American renewal and higher education, Reich concluded his address by saying of liberal arts education:

It is by no means difficult to extend Reich's injunction to each and every one of us and to all fields of education.

When ideas conflict in the realm of action, it is the political vocation of the scholar to reflect, weigh, and take a stand on controlling principles. Such situations give rise to the effort of academic theory, and however unfashionable, the conflict of ideas in action is still fundamental to resolving the historical dilemmas of our time. As educators engage the emerging realities, where will they stand?

Ideals of universal education are woefully far from fulfilment, and if we measure education as mastery of the knowledge and skills requisite for coping effectively with the complexities of human circumstances, people everywhere may be rapidly receding in their educational attainments.

Let me turn again to de Chardin:

Let me close with poetic but visionary words for what education can and must do, words as prophetic now as they were when written in the late 1700s.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

And note too, words from ancient Sanskrit:

Surviving Armageddon

Blessed is the one who reads, as well as those who hear the words of this prophecy and pay attention to what is written in it because the time is near. Revelation 1:3

On the very eve of the forthcoming millennium - well someone's millennium anyway:

Sodom, the biblical world's most sinful city, is about to get its first visitor since Lot left in haste as it was destroyed by heavenly fire 4000 years ago.

His wife of course stayed behind to enjoy the view.

We can wonder though if this visitor will be any more successful in finding a righteous person whose virtue might save the city from God's wrath?

In the sixteenth century the French seer Nostradamus wrote - but probably only after eating contaminated British beef. Aha you cry, perfidious Albion strikes yet again.

But as with so many other things he was just a little - or quite widely off the mark.

Re-calculating the necessary dates, using the current calendar that Nostradamus might have employed, the end of the days has passed - it was 11 - 15 August 1999!

Looks like most of us missed it.

Moreover, to say the least we are living in exciting times and are on the threshold of some cataclysmic changes!

Seeing how prophesies from hundreds and thousands of years ago accurately predicted world conditions today should encourage us in a number of ways.

Note too that a one-world government with a bestial leader and enforced credit system will arise.

Sounds like yet another review of Bill Clinton's presidency or of Microsoft's attempt to take over the world.

Persecution of those who refuse to cooperate with this regime will take place.

Hence you are all here on a late afternoon listening to this address!

You'll also be pleased to know that instead of listening to me, you could be attending a survivalist workshop in the USA devoted to learning to repair and modify engines and machinery - so that you can survive the forthcoming Armageddon.

Someone should tell them that August was three months ago!

Peter Drucker, the noted futurist thinker and writer, in a speech not so very long ago said:

Now here's another thought 80 per cent of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today. Every minute it is said that they add 2000 pages to humanity's scientific knowledge, and the scientific material they produce every 24 hours would take one person 5 years to read. About a half-million new books are published every year.

It's not the quantity, but the pertinence of your words that does the business - Seneca 4BCE - 65CE Epistles to Lucilius

Let me at the outset though, suggest to you at least one guiding principle:

There is a theory that states: "If anyone finds out what the universe is for it will disappear and be replaced by something more bizarrely inexplicable." There is another theory that states: "This has already happened"...Douglas Adams, Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

Systemic change manifested has itself in quite distinct ways:

incremental change through examination and improvement of existing processes, i.e. the kind of change we see in the development of a consumer item such as the motor-car which has evolved slowly over a period more than sixty years - although the manufacturers would like us to think otherwise;

discontinuous, or large-step change, which occurs out of the blue and which may be a sudden change in the external environment, e.g., the first major post war oil crisis of the early 1970s; or it may be internal, such as the development of a previously unconsidered, product or marketing opportunity.

And of course we have the Sophists, from the Greek sophoi or the wise ones, took up the epistemological question.

They concluded that no one can know anything with certainty - a doctrine of scepticism.

Protagoras, who lived in the 5th century BCE, said that everything is in a state of becoming; there is no stable being.

Somewhat later this notion of continuing change leads seemingly inexorably to issues strongly related to uncertainty. These are neatly illustrated - if not comprehensively explained - by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

The uncertainty principle is a good example of how the fundamentals of modern physics can contradict the axioms of common sense.

Consider then the advice of the noted physicist Max Planck, who in 1933 wrote of quantum mechanics:

Is this not also true of educational research?

Measurements, however made, furnish us with signs we must interpret and from which we must make meaning. Saussure, as you will read later in this paper said broadly similar things about language as an arbitrary phenomenon.

Perhaps though, we ought to be wary of some reforms such as those famously suggested by one Samuel Clements - otherwise known as Mark Twain - in A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling.

Needless to say, predicting the future is a notoriously difficult exercise, characterised by far more heroic failures than notable successes - at least in the sense of prediction alone.

Consider for example the following.

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist ... ." General Pinkerton at the Battle of Spotsylvania in the US Civil War.

"I wonder whether they've done the span calculations corre ... ." Klinker a famous engineer as his train plunged of a bridge into the River Rhone.

"Die my dear doctor, that is the last thing I shall do." Attributed to Palmerston, a British Prime Minister upon which he promptly did with an extra-ordinary sense of timing.

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." (Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949.)

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." (Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.)

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." (The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.)

"But what ... is it good for?" (Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.)

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." (Ken Olson, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.)

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." (Western Union internal memo, 1876.)

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" (David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.)

"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." (A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." (Bill Gates, 1981.)

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" (H M Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.)

"I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper." (Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in Gone With The Wind.)

"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." (Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.)

"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." (Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.)

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." (Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M Post-It Notepads.)

"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." (Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.)

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." (Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.)

"Everything that can be invented has been invented." (Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.)

To accompany the abbreviated list of heroic failures - for there are many others not listed - there is quite properly a lucidly expressed canon, viz:

(Now freely translated as the researchers' Bill of Rights)

(Anon)

As far as faiths go, may I quote my colleague Leigh Montford, who wrote recently:

"Religion - a system to keep the masses

On the straight and narrow.

I'm happy to be an atheist -

Strolling along the crooked and wide."

As something of an injunction Kanter (1997) wrote:

And lest you think I was too harsh on Skinner in my paper, allow me to quote:

Speaking about American renewal and higher education, Reich concluded his address by saying of liberal arts education:

Is not the task we are embarked upon -