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[Reviewed in THE FUTURIST, March-April 2006]
Anticipate the World You Want: Learning for Alternative Futures
by Marsha Lynne Rhea. ScarecrowEducation (Rowman & Littlefield). 2005. 114
pages. Paperback. $24.95. Order online from www.wfs.org/bkshelf.htm.
Preparing Youth for the Future
Book review by Edward CornishEducators are in the business of preparing young people for the future, but millions of young people leave school ill-prepared for work, marriage, parenthood, or citizenship.
One approach to improving the success rate of education is to futurize the curriculum. So it's a pleasure to welcome Marsha Rhea's readable and practical guide to helping young people think seriously about the turbulent, fast-changing world they must deal with when they leave school.
Rhea is well equipped to write this book. She is a senior futurist at the Institute for Alternative Futures in Arlington, Virginia, and has a lengthy background in education and futuring.
She advocates the adoption of "anticipatory learning" in schools, and she describes such techniques as strategic conversation (like Socratic dialogue), personal legacies (encouraging students to think what they would leave to future generations), and setting "audacious" goals.
Rhea neatly summarizes ideas from numerous advanced thinkers in education and futuring, such as Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, Peter Senge, David Hicks, and Howard Gardner, and she offers useful tips on accessing books and Web sites that can provide further guidance.
To help students think about their personal futures, Rhea suggests having them imagine they are getting a Nobel or other prestigious prize sometime in the future. Alternatively, the students might write their own obituaries recounting what newspapers would think worth telling their readers about.
Anticipate the Future You Want provides an engaging, wide-ranging, and up-to-date discussion of topics related to futuring and education. Even more useful for teachers may be the many specific suggestions that Rhea offers to educators on topics to be covered in a future-oriented course, approaches to teaching it, and references to original sources and documentation.
Anticipating the World You Want: Learning for Alternative Futures can be recommended to anyone interested in teaching young people to think about the world they will face in the years ahead.
About the Reviewer
Edward Cornish is editor of THE FUTURIST and author of Futuring: The Exploration of the Future (World Future Society, 2004).return to top
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