If you really want to know about the future, don't ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don't ask somebody who's writing code. No, if you want to know what society's going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of understanding societal change through the perspective of educators rather than technical experts.
Clifford Stoll highlights the idea that the future of society is shaped more significantly by the values, knowledge, and emotional intelligence imparted by educators, particularly kindergarten teachers, than by the technological advancements or scientific developments proposed by technologists and scientists. This suggests that the foundational experiences and social interactions fostered in early education play a crucial role in shaping the future culture and behavior of individuals in society.
In practice
In a speech about the future of technology, one might quote this to emphasize the role of education.
Data isn't information. ... Information, unlike data, is useful. While there's a gulf between data and information, there's a wide ocean between information and knowledge. What turns the gears in our brains isn't information, but ideas, inventions, and inspiration. Knowledge-not information-implies understanding. And beyond knowledge lies what we should be seeking: wisdom.
Data is not information, Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not understanding, Understanding is not wisdom.
Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization...I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.
I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose.
The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as a training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.
My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
Read to your children all of the time_x000D_ Novels and nursery rhymes_x000D_ Autobiographies, even the newspaper_x000D_ It doesn't mater; it's quality time_x000D_ Because once upon a time _x000D_ We grew up on stories in the voices in which they were told _x000D_ We need words to hold us and the world to behold us _x000D_ For us to truly know our souls
The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
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