I spent a good chunk of the weekend catching up on reading. On the fiction side, it was Haruki Murakami’s Dance, Dance, Dance, Roberto Bolano’s By Night in Chile, both of which I found good but not great. But I also read a book I picked up from a used book stall in Winnipeg: Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler (his wife Heidi was co-author, but this is deffo not evident from the cover and the marketing). If you’re under 50 years old, you probably have no idea how big a deal this book was: published in 1970, it sold about 6 million copies and was arguably one of the biggest books of the decade. And reading it today, nearly 55 years after it was published, well…it’s interesting.

The central thesis of the book is i) the rate of technological and social change is accelerating very quickly (it foreshadows a lot of “Fourth Industrial Revolution” nonsense in this respect) and ii) the accelerated rate of change in society can create physical and psychological dislocation (“future shock”) in individuals. The first two-thirds of the book marshal evidence for the first proposition both by cataloguing recent events (meaning mostly events of the 1960s) and projecting future developments in various spheres. Two chapters set out the evidence for the second, and the final hundred pages or so are a series of suggestions for how society can organize itself to avoid “future shock” tearing society apart.

Let’s dispense with the last chunk; in empirical terms, it’s nonsense. Toffler never rigorously defines either “rate of societal/ technological change” of “future shock” and therefore can’t correlate the two. It’s all anecdata. If you squint really hard and are very generous in your interpretation, you might suggest that the rise of populism in our day is actually revenge of the “future shocked,” but then you’d been getting perilously close to Thomas Friedman levels of pop generalizations.

But the earlier bits are interesting, for two reasons. First, it’s an absolute treasure trove of trivia about life in the late 1960s and the extent to which the service sector came into its own in that decade, in particular with respect to the end of mass-marketing and the arrival of segmented services (my favourite: TWA—that’s an airline, millennials—apparently at one point had “theme” flights within the USA: “Roman” flights where the stewardesses wore togas, “French” flights where “the food, the music, the magazines and the stewardess’ miniskirt were all from France,” and “Olde English” flights, in which the stewardesses were called “serving wenches” and the décor made up to supposedly match an English pub….this piece on air travel uniforms tells us that these get-ups were in fact made of paper and meant to be disposed of after one or two outings). Sure, sometimes you get some clangers that remind you that this book is, from our perspective, almost in the dark ages (“To most people, the term technology conjures up images of smoky steel mills or clanking machinery”) but arguably these just underline Toffler’s point that change has in some ways indeed been rapid in the last fifty years.

The second reason the book is interesting is that Toffler makes a lot of predictions over the first 200 pages, and while it’s easy enough to pick out the howlers (underwater cities are probably the biggest miss) the direction of travel he sketches out for society—or urban society at least—based on the observation that the three main trends of the era were transience, novelty, and diversity, were reasonably accurate.

Faithful readers will at this point suspect that there is a “but” coming here, and well done, you! You’re right. The “but” has to do with education, both on its own and in relation to the labour market and society. It’s off by a mile, and for reasons that I think are pretty instructive.

Let’s start from a very interesting point. Toffler makes a big deal of the impermanence of jobs and the stress this causes because of the need for constant re-training. He breathlessly recounts one report from the US Department of Labour stating that in the late 1960s the average person the US Labour Force had been in their job just 4.2 years and another report from the same source saying, “the average twenty year-old man (sic) could be expected to change jobs six or seven times [in a career].” This is…exactly the same as it is today (the DoL now tracks medians rather than averages, and the current figure is 4.1). So the “acceleration” in job changes? It never happened (be skeptical next time someone uses this kind of rhetoric, because it has remained remarkably prevalent for the past 60 years). Toffler’s speculation that such a future could bump up disastrously against (equally speculative) inherent human limits to continue learning throughout the life course was simply misplaced.

But Toffler’s bigger musings about higher education are perhaps more pertinent. He pretty much views education as a consumption good where the views of the consumer are paramount, and he notes that students want a pretty high degree of customization. From this he correctly predicts a broadening of course offerings, but incorrectly believed that standardizing systems like degrees and majors were on their way out. To wit: “Long before the year 2000, the entire antiquated structure of degrees, majors and credits will be a shambles. No two students will move along exactly the same educational track.”

(Toffler was very taken by anything that suggested impermanence and adhocracy in education. He was very big on Cedric Price’s plan for a mobile, rail-based university in England—for which, see here and here. He also thought that future-shock-proof K-12 schools should be constantly in motion, responsive to the continuous whims of local school councils because, really, who knew what the future would hold and didn’t you need to innovate constantly?)

This is all wrong, as we all know. And it contains some echoes of the kind of talk we heard a little over a decade when MOOCs came into vogue. Basically, in the absence of an ability to measure individuals’ skills and competencies directly, then degrees are going to be the basic currency of the labour market. And while majors and credits aren’t absolutely necessary as building blocks to a degree—competency-based education is a thing, after all—but they do have the advantage of incumbency. You can make up any future you want, and futurists are unfortunately too prone to assuming that just because something can happen it will do so (that was basically the logic behind MOOC-mania) but unless you reckon with the basic fact, you’re likely to go disastrously wrong in predicting institutional futures.