Early, much too early thoughts wander into alien areas. As centuries go by, the burden grows on each new generation to learn what has gone before. The last one hundred years alone: World Wars, airplanes, cars, telephones and tv sets, computers and the internet; things our grandparents lived and learned instead of finding out from books.
So obviously, even as our lives stretch into longer spaces of time, there will come a day when a lifetime simply isn’t long enough to learn or read about it all. Besides the basic knowledge of what has gone before, we’d have to consider as well that time must be made for going forward. For new ideas to develop; for books to be written as well as being read.
Schools and universities will have to pick and choose what can be covered in classroom time. Wars will be dropped from emphasis, eventually from textbooks and online learning courses too. With cultural diversity becoming an important part of the criteria in learning, and (sadly) political influence and ramifications in all but maybe Algebra, and technology being of such necessity to every student to learn regardless of aspirations, that’s quite a load of stuff.
What will be dropped? I wonder.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology