From an old world -view to a new.

Read this!!! It is a long article but worth reading it... 

*esp for teachers/teacher to be/people who think everyone can teach easily/hehe sepa2 pun buli ba*

'I am the future's child'

Hullo. I am Angelica. I am 5 years old. I really don't have much of a past. In fact, I am the future.

You need to understand what I am learning to believe, how I think about my future, what my world-view is. You and I both want me to be a success in the world which I will enter as an adult and which I will be responsible for. In future days I will admire you for being able to look forward with me and to help me define what I need to learn.

My world is already different from the one you have grown up in. On present life expectancy figures, I will live until I am over 80. So I will be alive and well in the 2070s, and my children will live to see the twenty-second century. Can you even imagine what the world will be like for them?

Only three of every hundred babies born this year live in developed countries. So wherever I live or work, I will certainly be mixing in a multi-national, multi-cultural and multi-faith setting, and white people could be the ethnic minorities. I will have to think about that when I prepare for a job.

During my lifetime, a planet-wide economic system will operate, controlled not so much by big nations as by big bussiness networks and by regional centres of trade like Singapore, Bangkok, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and sydney. By the time I am 30, there are in the whole of the South Pacific, Including Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

The Asia/Pacific area will be a strong focus of my world. China already has a population ten times of Japan, and nearly half a billion Chinese re under the age of 25. The Asian continent (from India to Japan) already accounts for half the world's population. A Hong Kong bank advertises now, 'There are three billion people in Asia. Half of them are under 25. Consider it a growing market.' Those under 25s are my contemporaries. They will be very aggresive in a number of ways, good and bad, over the next few decades. 

It wil not matter what nationality I have, because my world is smaller, people move about, and most workplaces will be internationalized. My world is likely to be borderless. I will have acces to the world economy through overseas. I will spend holidays in China, visit South America often, and I will work for periods in Africa. I will probably be employed in an internationally owned firm, and it is likely that in my home we will speak Japanese, Korean, Spanish, English or Chinese as a second language.

to be continue........

Beare, H (2001) 'From an Old world-view to a new' Creating the future school, Routledge Falmer, London pp11-12.