ABSTRACT
The shift to the knowledge society therefore puts the person in the center. In so doing, it raises new challenges, new issues, new and quite unprecedented questions about the knowledge society’s representative, the educated person. In all earlier societies, the educated person was an ornament. He or she embodied Kultur—the German term that with its mixture of awe and derision is untranslatable into English. The educated person will have to be far less exclusively “bookish” than the product of the liberal education of the humanists. Yet the knowledge society needs a kind of educated person different from the ideal for which the humanists are fighting. They rightly stress the folly of their opponents’ demand to repudiate the Great Tradition and the wisdom, beauty, and knowledge that are the heritage of mankind. Postcapitalist society is both a knowledge society and a society of organizations, each dependent on the other and yet each very different in its concepts, views, and values.
