I’m backing up quotes and things from stickies on the desktop to my blog, prior to leaving the BBC this friday.

This one is Alvin Toffler:

“I once had a class of 15-year-old high school kids and I gave them index cards, and I said, “Write down seven things that will happen in the future.”

They said there would be revolutions and presidents would be assassinated, and we would all drown in ecological sludge. A very dramatic series of events. But I noticed that of the 198 items that they handed in, only six used the word “I.”

So I gave them another set of cards, and I said, “Now I want you to write down seven things that are going to happen to you.”

Back came, “I will be married when I’m 21,” “I will live in the same neighborhood, I will have a dog.”

And the disjuncture between the world that they were seeing out there and their own presuppositions was amazing We thought about this, and concluded on the basis of just guesswork that the image of reality that they’re getting from the media is one of high-speed rapid change, and the image that they’re getting in their classrooms is one of no change at all. “

It’s originally from a Wired interview with Toffler, but I found the quote in an essay called: Human Redundancy by Coleen Gittin.