Paper presented at the conference on “Liberal Education in a KnowledgeSociety,” La Salle, Illinois, May 30 - June 1, 1997Bereiter, C. (in press). Education in a knowledge society. In B. Smith(Ed.), Liberal education in a knowledge society. Chicago: Open Court.Education in a Knowledge SocietyCarl BereiterTwo of the most important influences on educational planning today are whatfor want of an established name I will call the futuristic business literature andthe work coming out of cognitive science, broadly defined. There are, of course,many other influences, often from groups with a concern for some particularsubject or aspect of schooling. But the two I have named are especially sweepingin their implications for educational change, each, in quite different ways,suggesting a reconceptualization of what schooling should be about. Yet each ofthese stops short of answering the question, “What should it mean to be aneducated person in the 21st century?”That is the kind of question that has motivated the development of liberaleducation and its periodic transformations. The rise of the natural sciences led tothe most profound transformation of liberal education. There were fears that itmight not survive the transformation but it did, and no one would any longerconceive of an educated person who was ignorant of science. Now we are facingthe possibility of a more radical transformation, one that does not involve somuch the incorporation of new disciplines as a change in the way all disciplinesare approached. Rumblings of such a transformation have been occurringthroughout the past century, but the two new influences, along with thetechnologies they draw upon, may finally make it happen. Will it mean the endof liberal education (assuming it is not already dead) or will liberal education re-emerge, strengthened through its renovation? I think liberal education can berenewed, but it will take a careful synthesis of new ideas and enduring principles.Liberal education is essentially enculturation. It is more than the handing onof a body of knowledge and wisdom, although that is a large part of it. That isthe part that liberal education has in common with enculturation in all societies.What makes liberal education distinctive—what makes it ‘liberal’—is itscosmopolitanism. Liberal education initiates the young into a culture thattranscends the particularities of their social and ethnic backgrounds. A majorconcern of many advocates of liberal education is that cosmopolitanism itself iscoming under attack. Although I share that concern, I shall not dwell on it here.It has been more than adequately discussed. Instead, I will assume in the ensuingdiscussion that cosmopolitanism of some kind is an agreed-upon end ofeducation. The liberal tradition, the new wave of economic globalization, andrecent advances in the learning sciences all point in this direction. But how is suchcosmopolitanism to be achieved when cultures are colliding and undergoingrapid, perhaps catastrophic change, when knowledge is expanding more rapidlythan anyone can keep up with, and when the process of enculturation itself issubject to radical innovation? That is the question I raise for discussion here.The discussion begins by drawing out the contrasting educationalimplications of the futuristic business literature and of cognitive learningresearch—the one emphasizing skills and personal qualities, the otheremphasizing knowledge. Merging the two into lists of educational objectives, asis now common, does not begin to resolve underlying differences. Theresolution I propose depends upon taking seriously the idea of a knowledgesociety, a society organized around the production of knowledge in the samesense that an agrarian society is organized around agricultural production and anindustrial society is organized around manufacture. My proposal is that theschool should be a productive part of that society, a workshop for the generationof knowledge. Transforming schools into workshops for the production ofknowledge mobilizes those skills and personal qualities valued by businessfuturists, putting them to work toward ends that are consistent withcontemporary conceptions of learning and with the objectives of a modernizedliberal education.Two Views of Education for the 21st CenturyBy the ‘futuristic business literature’ I refer to that flood of publications fromorganizational theorists, management consultants, economists, futurologists, anddiverse social scientists that take as a backdrop the rapid rate of technologicalchange, the rise of Asia Pacific economies, digitization, globalization,outsourcing, the shift from a manufacturing-based to a knowledge-basedeconomy, and the need for constant innovation. This literature covers a greatrange in quality of ideas, which raises the twin dangers that policy makers maybe influenced most by the lowest level and easiest to grasp ideas and thatdiscriminating people will reject the whole literature, thereby ignoring ideas thatprovide a basis for well-reasoned new educational policies.Some low-end educational ideas are that technology will revolutionizeeverything, that we don’t need schools anymore, and that there is no usemastering any body of knowledge because it will soon be obsolete. The high-endeducational ideas mainly flow from a recognition of the ascendant importance ofknowledge: knowledge as a third factor in production, along with capital andlabor; learning as the means for organizations to gain a competitive edge; finally,the idea of a social transformation going on that is as extreme as the 19th-century shift from an agrarian to an industrial society—the shift to a knowledgesociety.When it comes to formulating curriculum guidelines, however, the low-endand the high-end ideas seem to point in the same direction. They point to a set ofpersonal qualities that must be cultivated if the education system is to producepeople who can thrive in and contribute to the new order: imagination andcreativity, ability to work in groups, communication skills, information-findingskills, problem solving abilities, technological literacy, and above all a continualreadiness to learn. It is difficult to fault these, and they are now appearingconspicuously in curriculum guidelines and standards. But are they sufficient, anddo they point educational planning in the right direction? That they are not theonly answer becomes evident if we consider these questions from