All education springs from some image of the future. 46) If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth.Imagine an Indian tribe which for centuries has sailed its dugouts on the river at its doorstep. During all this time the economy and culture of the tribe have depended upon fishing, preparing and cooking the products of the river, growing food in soil fertilized by the river, building boats and appropriate tools. 47) So long as the rate of technological change in such a community stays slow, so long as no wars, invasions, epidemics or other natural disasters upset the even rhythm of life, it is simple for the tribe to formulate a workable image of its own future, since tomorrow merely repeats yesterday.It is from this image that education flows. Schools may not even exist in the tribe; yet there is a curriculum -- a cluster of skills, values and rituals to be learned. Boys are taught to scrape bark and hollow out trees, Just as their ancestors did before them. The teacher in such a system knows what he is doing, secure in the knowledge that tradition of the past -- will work in the future.48) What happens to such a tribe, however, when it pursues its traditional methods unawarethat five hundred miles upstream men are constructing a gigantic dam that will dry up their branch of the river Suddenly the tribe’s image of the future, the set of assumptions on which its members base their present behavior, becomes dangerously misleading. Tomorrow will not replicate today. The tribal investment in preparing its children to live in a river culture becomes a pointless and potentially tragic waste. A false image of the future destroys the relevance of the education effort.This is our situation today. Only it is we, ironically, not some distant strangers who are building the dam that will annihilate the culture of the present. 49) Never before has any culture subjected itself to so intense and prolonged a bombardment of technological, social, and info psychological change. 50) This change is accelerating and we witness everywhere in the high: technology societies’ evidence that the old industrial-era structures can no longer carry out their functions. 50) This change is accelerating and we witness everywhere in the high: technology societies’ evidence that the old industrial-era structures can no longer carry out their functions.