ABSTRACT
Education is the drive-wheel of citizenship in the "informatized" society. America's twentieth-century knowledge-driven revolution had started, after all, in its schools and colleges. A century of universal compulsory education had set us up for the US economic miracle, a morality play in which the main actors were educated farmers, educated industrial workers, educated college graduates who went on to become prize-winning scientists and inventors, enterprising business managers, and creative public executives. Interdisciplinary thinking at its best is done, not by committees of disciplinary experts, but by individual human minds prepared for it. "Global perspectives in education" is no longer an exotic idea in American education. Perhaps, in the alternating current of general and job-oriented education, it is time for a new synthesis, a new "core curriculum". Work, and therefore education for work, will become less competitive and more organized around cooperation.
