ABSTRACT
Almost forty years ago, Sonnemann (1969) presented a description of the state of the world which included possible assessments of the existing conditions of education and society in light of the social conditions at that time. In light of the present situation, it is essentially still current:
[W]hile (natural) scientific technique fulfils one utopia after the other—people cling to existing relationships of their consciousness and their societies with an unconsciousness that so trustingly takes shelter in power as an unadvised hiker would do to a single willow tree when there is lightning; the discrepancy between the fate that lies in the cainitic effects of a striving immobility that has become militant, and the lessening of power that can be used against it even now, becomes more threatening, the time span that may remain until World War Three drives the reflexive minorities into a haste that does not favour the reflexion on whose accuracy everything must depend. Its chance is not hopeless, yet it is slight, to a certain extent it requires, should it even remain one, luck. (Sonnemann 1969, 14)
