Page 169 - The Drucker Lectures

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with the people who are going to employ the workers of tomor-
row. We know a great deal about training people. These are
people with very limited horizons, and limited experiences, and
limited time spans. So the need is to have people retrained where
the next job is, and for the next job. This is not something that
you can do by having an educational program. But we also have
tremendous educational needs for the educated people. Technol-
ogy is changing so fast and not just in high tech; it’s changing
even faster in medicine. I have a nephew who is a prominent
radiologist; he is probably the best-known professor of radiology
in the United States. He said to me, “You know, Uncle Peter, if I
do not go back to school every three years for a six-week course,
I am obsolete.”
We need it for teachers, especially in the university where,
bluntly, the level of teaching today is very, very poor all over the
world. We need it for almost every profession—for accountants
and for managers. We need to have facilities for the continuing
education of already highly educated adults. This, again, is a local
need. It’s undertaken by this university and by that university.
We also need nonprofits to meet local social needs. Take
the rehabilitation of alcoholics, which we now know how to do.
Thirty years ago we did not. Today we know how to do it with
a fairly high success rate. We can rehabilitate 50 percent, maybe
60 percent. But it’s done locally. And it is done by local groups,
made up mostly of ex-alcoholics, but it is not done nationally. All
government programs to rehabilitate alcoholics or drug addicts
have failed. Local volunteer programs staffed by volunteers—
and mostly by people who have been in that predicament them-
selves—are remarkably successful.
We need local volunteers, as well, for what is one of our great-
est needs: to organize the systematic exposure of young people
to foreign cultures. You know, three of my four children, when
they were young, worked abroad. One in Japan for three years,