Zach agrees. “The great failure of the average person is not to take personal responsibility for the future,” he says. As he explained to an audience of high school students, “Anyone who stops learning and who stops playing — the future doesn’t have a place for you. If you ever stop learning, you’re toast.”
He Who Learns Last, Gets Left
Alvin Toffler, who put futurism on the map when he wrote the bestseller Future Shock way back in 1970, got it right when he predicted that the rise of computers would radically change our world. Chances are, he’s right about this, too: “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Bill Draves ’71 isn’t a futurist, although he’s often called one. He founded a nonprofit association called LERN (the Learning Resources Network), and he’s written a book called Nine Shift: Work, Life, and Education in the 21st Century. In it, he points out that “in an age of continual change, learning has to be constant and continual.” Because new jobs will require this habit of nonstop learning, he thinks that government will eventually move to supply business with knowledge workers by creating Individual Learning Accounts, or ILAs, to help workers fund their continuing education.