The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.
Interpretation
The future will be defined not just by literacy, but by the ability to learn and adapt.
Alvin Toffler's quote emphasizes that true literacy in the modern world will go beyond the ability to read and write. Instead, it will hinge on an individual's capacity to learn and evolve in a rapidly changing environment, highlighting the importance of lifelong learning over mere traditional education.
In practice
In a seminar about lifelong education, one might quote Toffler to emphasize the importance of learning skills.
Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets_x000D_ _x000D_ loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today_x000D_ _x000D_ the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the_x000D_ _x000D_ techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.
Future shock is the disorientation that affects an individual, a corporation, or a country when he or it is overwhelmed by change and the prospect of change ... we are in collision with tomorrow.
The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.
If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.
To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.
Our task - and the task of all education - is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices.
No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.
May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
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