Page 82 - The Drucker Lectures

What We Already Know about American Education Tomorrow [ 63

and the wrong measurements—and they are most likely to
be right. But they will only have themselves to blame. One
way or another American education tomorrow will be held
accountable and should be held accountable.
7. And finally, the most important change perhaps: American
education tomorrow will no longer assume that one stops
learning when one starts working. It will no longer assume
that one learns when one is too young to do anything else,
and especially too young to work. It will no longer assume
that learning stops when living begins. On the contrary, it
will assume the opposite: Learning is lifelong. And the most
important learning, the most important true education, is the
continuing education of adults who already have a high degree
of formal education and considerable achievement and success
in their own work and life. By tomorrow, we will know that
the most important periods of learning are probably the ones
that were not considered the “normal” learning age—the pre-
school years, the years of the infant; and the postschool years,
the years of the adult. And that, in turn, is bound to have a
profound impact on the structure, the curriculum, the meth-
ods, and the position of traditional education. We will again
return to the stage before the “educational explosion” of the
last 100 years, the stage when most people were expected to
learn as part of their normal life rather than as something
separate from life, isolated from it, and set apart. Only while
before, the nineteenth-century learning was almost entirely
outside of school, school now is going to be part of life, part of
the ongoing, the continuing, the normal everyday experience
of the adult, and especially of the highly educated adult.

From the William T. Beadles Lecture for the American College of Life Un-
derwriters.