So says 78-year-old Professor Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, in a January 23 TIME Magazine interview.
This, he continues, explains why "People feel they are losing control over their own lives." That's the nerve Trump touched and it goes a long way toward explaining his victory.
I've been harping for a long time --- on this blog and elsewhere --- about the coming tsunami... the Fifth Wave. It's both gratifying and frightening that Dr. Schwab is in such firm agreement.
As the Fifth Wave washes away the traditional, narrow notions of how to get a college education, it brings to our shores a challenge: what will everybody do... whether we all need to earn a living in the post-Wave brave new world, or we are subsidized by our government.
And it's not just about jobs... or their disappearance. It's about civil rights and civil liberties. In Schwab's words, "Following World War II, the world mostly shared values about human rights, democracy and so forth. Many believed that Western liberal ideas would be universal. But today it is not the case that we share the same values. If you look at Russia, China, Turkey --- and even inside our societies --- people have different concepts about how to organize big societies."
As I see it, higher education has three goals vis a vis our students: (1) preparing them to make good livings in satisfying careers; (2) preparing them to be good citizens who value and defend their civil rights and civil liberties; and (3) guiding them in discovering how to live satisfying, rewarding lives beyond their professional and civic engagements, i.e., how to make leisure time worthwhile.
And we need to do all this within a disrupted higher-education establishment.
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