“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Alvin Toffler
Dr Abe V Rotor
Living with Nature - School on Blog
Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid with Ms Melly C Tenorio
738 DZRB AM, 8 to 9 evening class, Monday to Friday
1. Alvin Toffler is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing digital revolution, communications revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity. T
2. Actually Alvin Toffler’s work is a joint undertaking with his wife – Heidi Toffler – also a writer and a futurist. T
3. Among the most influential voices among business leader Alvin Toffler, Peter Drucker, and Bill Gates. F
4. “Society need people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest.” Says Bill Gates one of the richest man on earth. “Society needs all kinds of skill that are not just cognitive; they’re emotional, they’re affectional. You can’t run the society on data and computers alone.” T
5. The first wave is the society characterized by hunting and gathering – a nomadic society transient and divided – which favored early humans to explore the world in their time. The Fertile Crescent (which was later part of Babylon at the confluence of the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers was the first site ushering the beginning of the First Wave or the Agrarian Society. T
6. The First Wave Society is characterized by the nuclear family, factory-type education system and the corporation. F
7. The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass transit, mass entertainment, weapon of mass destruction, mass religion. T
8. The Third Wave Society is a combination of mass movement and bandwagon with standardization, centralization, and synchronization, often ending up with bureaucracy. T
9. Two predictions of the Third Wave by its advocates led by Toffler are paperless office and human cloning. We have not really realized this no doubt, in spite of technological barriers and politico-religious conditions have imposed regulations and generated varying opinions and controversies. T
10. Third Wave means a post-industrial society. It has generated keywords to unwind the complexity that characterize our society today, some of these are Super-Industrial Society, Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village, Cyberspace, Technetronic Age. These include terms like e-Commerce, e-learning, e-mail, on-line teaching, global positioning, Google Earth, ATM, globalization, and the like. T
11. The Third Wave Society is an aging society. It is found in highly industrialized countries where population is coming to a standstill, where longevity breeds octogenarians up to centenarians. There will be need of new medical technologies from self-diagnosis, self-administer therapies delivered by nanotechnology to do for themselves what doctors used to do. Robotics are no longer workers in industries; they are becoming domesticated. T
12. “Prosumers” is a coined word – producer and consumer. It means we are eliminating much of the work of middlemen. We are linking production and consumption directly. Examples are freelance work, open source, assembly kit, instant house package, build your own car or plane. These belong to the second wave. T
Darwinism, or "evolution and the survival of the fittest" is the most controversial idea that continues to shock the world. From its original application in the biological world, Darwinism as applied in human society has deep implications to ideology, business, politics, religion and in others aspects.
13. The Third Wave changes the concept of retirement (re-tire as good as new tire), child labor (kids are smarter, they can earn and make a living early), education (distance education, on-line, crash workshop), nationalism (citizen of the world, too); concepts of capitalism, socialism, nation-state, so with corporation, cooperatives, entrepreneurship, management, and the like. T
14. The Third Wave depended much on international organizations such as the UN and its organizations like FAO, WHO, WTO UNEP, WFO; and other regional and international organizations like APEC, EU, NATO, ANZUS, International Court of Justice, North American Union.T
15. The Fourth Wave is simply the expansion into outer space, possibly incorporating the rise of a second agricultural revolution, to enable off-world; it means reclamation of the desolate regions of the earth; it means a prototype superhuman created by genetic engineering. T
16. Franklin DS Roosevelt and Nikita Khrushchev, though pole apart in ideological beliefs, are both influential in making China a modern nation. T
17. Among the socialists that influenced China are Marx, Lenin, and Engels – all Germans. T
18. Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus – evolutionist and traditionalist, respectively changed China’s thinking regarding demography. T
19. Michel Jordan and Yao Ming are towering giants in the NBA, first in NBA’s history to have a Chinese regular player. T
20. These artists changed China – Picasso for abstract art, Marilyn Monroe for feminism, Mother Teresa for religiosity; Julius Caesar for autocracy.T
21. There are great men who became famous for their prophesies - Nostrodamus and Malthus. One saw tomorrow; the other, The Four Horsemen of Apocalypse.T
22. Philosophy – both ancient and modern – can be traced ultimately to Socrates, be it Platonian, or Aristotelian, the philosophies of Emmanuel Kant, Marx, Thoreau. T
23. One man fought a nation, and save a nation, abhorring violence His only weapon: peaceful protest and civil disobedience in asceticism that swept the land, people revering him as father and almost god. His name is Gandhi. His name is Mao Tse Tung. His name is Ho Chi Ming. His name is Jose Rizal. Her name is Mother Teresa. Her name is Princess Diana. His name is Alexander Pope. His name is Jose Burgos. They are people of all seasons, of all ages, of all waves – first, second third, and fourth. T
24. We are living in a Post-Modern World, which means we are "living tomorrow." We are living ahead of our time. We call this Futurism. T
25.Little do we know of the unknown great man, like the Unknown Soldier, yet he represents countless people whose deeds are also those of great men and women we revere today. They are us – each one of us. Each in his own little way to make the world go round and around – or make it slower, that we may taste better the real Good Life, the sweet waters of the Pierian Spring, (“A little learning is a dangerous thing: drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring.” – Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism) Very true
In Thomas Gray’s Elegy on a Country Churchyard, “Full many a gem of purest ray serene, the deep unfathomed caves the oceans bear; full many a many flower is born to blush unseen, and waste their sweetness in the desert air.” This unknown great man did not die in vain, in the same way we should regard ourselves because we – all of us has the capacity to be great. Bringing up our children to become good citizens, being a Samaritan on a lonely road, embracing a returning Prodigal Son, “plugging a hole in the dike like the boy who saved Holland from being engulfed by the sea,” or living life the best way we can that make other live the same – these and countless deeds make us great, and if in that little way we fall short of it, then each and everyone of us putting each small deeds together, make the greatest ever deed, for the greatest thing humans can do is collective goodness – the key to true unity and harmony. ~