ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the educators and people associated with schools can respond to these challenges. However, the important thing about young people's fears and concerns is their degree of optimism and pessimism, the nature of the human responses which result from. Let us simply note here that, given appropriate understanding, guidance, no young people need to remain depressed or fearful about their present or their future. One of the outcomes most often reported from well-grounded futures work in education is an increase in optimism and empowerment on the part of the students. The central importance of changes in values, in ways of knowing, in assumptions about meanings - in short, implication of paradigm shifts - has too often been overlooked in educational discourse. A doubling of the human life span. Think of the consequences such a development will have on social structures, on family life, promotion in one’s employment, on the meaning of work and of retirement.
