Gary Marx writes a compelling article about the release of human ingenuity that will become a primary responsibility of education and society; in effect the acquisition of information will lead to the creation of new knowledge and breakthrough thinking. The conclusion is that knowledge will become the new currency or the future and the new entrepreneurs will be intellectual (Marx, 2006, p. 163). Marx calls this the new era of enlightenment where connections will be made across disciplines in the forms of teaching, learning, and thinking. The acceleration of knowledge is already affecting our world on almost an exponential level and Marx points out the new mandates of education will come in the form of teaching towards cognition and creation will be rewarded highly in the next generation of the educated (Marx, 2006, p. 173-174). Thinking and reasoning will not be elective any more in the sense that formal training in logic will not just be for the elite classical or Socratic/Platonic environments, but it will be the expectation for all students who attend school in the future.
Self Directed Learning
Within the boundaries and established morays and norms of every culture is the individual sense of self – who he/she is and how he/she views him/herself within that culture. This view of self helps to define the persons overall worldview and within the context of that worldview there are sets of beliefs about everything within the world to be quite literal – this is known as a person’s noetic structure, what he/she believes about anything and everything, and it is here that the greatest paradigm shifts of all are occurring. In fact one’s belief about oneself is mutual exclusive to their ability to be motivated, inspired and challenged to take part in their own transformation through education (Mirriam, Caffarella, & Baumgartner, 2007, p. 107). As one looks at any level of future predictions for future generations, especially within the context of education, there is a very real sense of a cultural change of self that can not be ignored any longer if success is to be achieved in making a difference locally and globally in the lives of people (Marx, 2006, p. 119-120).
