First, a brief statement of the problem: While they have gained abilities in a few new areas, today's children know either a little or a lot less about a large number of specialized subjects and skills than their "better-schooled" parents did at their age.

This is a simple consequence of our increasingly automated society. We can tick off a growing list of capabilities (food preparation ability, home building, automotive repair, mathematical ability, reading and writing ability, logical reasoning, critical argument, etc.) that are no longer as carefully learned-or studied at all-by today's youth. Such skills have been deprioritized in an increasingly fast-paced and complex world. It shocks some of us to realize that there are kids growing up today who may never become proficient at reading a physical map, if they are given regular access to GPS navigation PDAs and modern cars from birth. What does this mean for the future?

To some, this powerful trend toward an increasingly automation-enhanced, computer-enhanced living is disturbing. Yet in the context of globally accelerating technological change, we cannot conclude that today's youth are less prepared for twenty first century society than someone who has devoted precious time and brain space to becoming adept at the older, manual skills.

In our mapreading example, if GPS map readers become exponentially more affordable, ubiquitous, and powerful each year, manual map reading may eventually become as poor a skill choice as learning to hand weave textiles became in the 20th century. Essentially, once the new technologies are effective, the manual skill loses economic value every year forward by comparison to the technological alternative.

Let us ask a few Socratic questions to elucidate the issues. Are today's children more cortically stimulated than the kids of a generation ago? Most certainly so. Do they have earlier social maturity and a more nuanced emotional intelligence than their parents? Several studies have reached this conclusion. But do today's children have better analytical and critical thinking abilities? Are they more independent thinkers? Most likely not, by many of our traditional measures at least. Here lies the crux of the issue.

We all know that youth math and science abilities have fallen significantly in recent generations Perhaps the definitive study in this area is the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). TIMSS has been conducted in 1995, 1999, and 2003 (data pending). The 1995 results ranked U.S. 12th graders 19th out of 21 countries in math and 16th out of 21 in science. What's more, the relative performance of U.S. eighth graders in 1999 was worse than for fourth graders in 1995. And we've seen several studies that argue a number of related critical thinking and motivational skills that are also less developed in today's "MTV generation" than in the past.

At one level we've all caused this outcome, because we've collectively allowed a plutocratic swing to emerge in our society, a culture where there aren't strong economic and social incentives for every citizen to learn such skills, in competition with all the other enticements of modern life. Rather than dive further into the data regarding homework, aptitude scores, and time spent thinking or learning about mathematical and scientific topics, let's simply grant the point and consider possible solutions we might implement in coming years.

It hurts to realize that a technology-enabled fallback in education for independent thought has occurred in our plutocratic and unilateral U.S. of the early 21st century. Regardless of how many technological skills our youth are learning, it disturbs us to see that they have also, at least in the last few decades, become noticeably less analytical, less able or inclined to understand and objectively evaluate the dynamics of the society they live in. The ability to think independently is a part of the human experience we don't want to see automated. To use an important word from biology, societies that suffer this fate become "clonal," like China under Mao or Afghanistan under the Taliban. Clonal societies are intellectually homogenous, internally weak, and rapidly surpassed by heterogeneous ones. We don't want to think our nation may be heading in this direction.

We will briefly address this educational fallback in the remainder of this essay. How can we, as activist futurists, improve analytical and critical thinking in today's youth? How can we make a stronger and more critical liberal society, the necessary base for any healthy democracy?

Perhaps most importantly as developmental futurists, we should recognize that the fallback in youth abilities has occurred not only due to the political and economic climate, but far more importantly, as a result of the technological one. We are currently engaged in a momentous systems transition from human-based to machine-based educational infrastructures on this planet. We live in a world where the old-guard hierarchical, human-centric educational infrastructure is currently being taken apart and reorganized by our emerging network-based electronic educational infrastructure (digital television, first generation internet, video games, cell phones, etc.). We can expect to see the new electronic ecologies continue to outcompete the more humanizing, more mature, but substantially slower and older biology-based infrastructures during this transition period.

As I've noted before, first generation technological systems are often dehumanizing (see Smart's Third Law of Technology). While today's early digital systems can easily grab the eyeballs and brain space of our youth, and push a lot of raw information, they also deliver much less filtered wisdom, and can't yet offer high levels of personalization, motivation, outcome monitoring, or efficiency. Such systems divert children from the many advantages of the old infrastructure, but without yet offering much real education within the new.

But wait until the intelligent, conversational user interface (CUI)-based internet in 2020, then ask this question about critical thinking skills in technologically advanced countries. By then, if accelerating trends in computation continue as they have for the last century, our digital personalities will be our best coaches and educators, and human performance will have moved to a whole new amazing level that only the future-aware among us truly appreciate today. Our political and economic desires for increasing personal empowerment, development, and democracy will be tremendously aided by the networks of tomorrow. The pendulum will finally swing back, with a vengeance.

As activist futurists, most of us want to catalyze this deeply humanizing transition. To that end, systems theory offers us at least four obvious options, political, economic, social, and technological levers of change. All of these play an important role, but as Archimedes reminds us, technology is the "lever that moves the world." Let's consider each briefly for some insights in that regard.

First, let's recognize that political systems are the oldest dialog of change. I would argue that they were eclipsed in power by economic systems after the rise of mature Mercantilism (1500's to 1700's), aided by the industrial revolution in the 1800's. Economic systems were then transformed by social (mass consumption) and technological systems (mass production) in the 1920's, and ultimately surpassed in importance by technological systems with the dawn of the digital age in the 1950's. Political systems are, grossly, the least relevant lever of accelerating change.

The U.S. political system is presently engaged in a deeply plutocratic and unilateral swing. To me, this argues strongly that powerful political solutions to our national educational problems are highly unlikely to be forthcoming. Indeed, I expect they will be the least effective strategies in the present environment. The vested interests have no strong reason to change the status quo. I stand in solidarity with them, but we must also realize that any educational futurist trying to effect change politically today is in for a very difficult fight.

There is some partial justification for our current administration's unilateral outlook on the world. Leaders are needed in times of crisis, and it does seem very likely that we lead the world in understanding and modeling the way that technology is going to impact culture on the planet, including the way technology is going to build national security, a fundamentally important human need in all world cultures. Furthermore, the tolerant, multicultural, rights-oriented, representative democracy we are building here seems to be a global attractor.

But all this gives us no right to think that because we lead in certain ways, the world revolves around us: it decidedly does not. What the U.S. is going to learn over the next two decades is that the developing nations are going to advance economically much faster than we are, in an absolute sense. U.S. society is an example of the saturation in productivity that occurs when you continue to throw more and more physical goods, wealth, and increasingly pandering programs of higher education at individual human beings. We have an epidemic of obesity, we are less willing to work hard than ever before (though we are fortunately still more productivity- and competition-oriented than several socialist European nations), and we require a burgeoning variety of entitlements and creature comforts. Our youth are attention-distracted by endless entertainment choices.

The United States remains an innovation engine, to be sure. There is yet a chance that our economic productivity will continue to exceed that of other nations, perhaps even China, given our service sector, for several decades. But our growth rate must be flat by comparison to the emerging nations for deep computational reasons. Futurist Glen Hiemstra uses the excellent word "rationalization" to describe the globalization outsourcing we are seeing today. Don't think globalization, think "rationalization" of the world's workforce. The next several decades will see a leveling what has been an increasingly irrational and unsustainable income differential between global haves and have-nots. Today's IT outsourcing is only a feeble early example of what will come the better our global technological and legal infrastructure becomes. Our own music in Earth's symphony will be joined by, and collectively exceeded by many others as hundreds of millions of the world's most enterprising and underpaid workers are connected to and educated by the emerging intelligent global web.

When we consider economic systems as levers of change, especially in the context of our globalizing economy, we realize that there are also problems attempting to effect educational change in the U.S in coming years. In a plutocratic era, many commercial forces will be closely allied with the existing educational power structures, far more concerned with protecting their jobs than creating reform. While they will be open to ventures for improving children's education that fit with their conservative agenda, big textbook and other educational companies are, in general, unlikely to initiate transformational programs for improving the quality of educational systems today.

Furthermore, considering our global economy, we are increasingly realizing that the dominant economic dynamic of coming decades will not be centered around the United States. Now that we have a good first generation internet and global connectivity, the internet economy has discovered that far more productivity can be gained by preferentially developing the emerging nations. Because computing and networks have unified economic and cultural interchange, all enterprise is increasingly able to form international partnerships, to seek global solutions.

Let me make a clear prediction that the Information, Income and Wealth Gaps between First and Third Worlds, which grew throughout the 20th century, will be narrowing in the 21st. We see unmistakable signs of this already. Because globalization is a strongly nonzero sum game, we are definitely going to see the U.S. standard of living increase in this process. But it will increase far less than the emerging nations standards in coming years, making up for past imbalances, as it should.

The U.S. is only 4% of the world's population. By simple mathematics, the third world tech support staff will soon outnumber the first world's five to one, perhaps eventually even ten to one. We can't expect U.S. youth, presently grappling with the consequences of our culture's material success, to provide the dominant tech support for the most important transition coming our way: the building of the next generation planetary internet, a conversational user interface, and all the amazing global technological intelligence and new economic enterprise that tomorrow's network will enable.

It is the hungry emerging nations youth who will do the bulk of IT tech support for Earth's next generation internet economy in coming decades, just like the hard working Chinese and Irish immigrants built out the railroads, the dominant network of 19th century. If we are foresighted and global in our education, U.S. youth can creatively collaborate and partner with the world's workforce in this monumental task, and they will do so on their own initiative in increasingly powerful groupware and simulation environments in coming decades, in myriad ways we can scarcely imagine today. We are heading into a truly global transition, now that we have the network to do so (the first generation internet). The sooner realize this the better we will be able to help our youth participate meaningfully in the rapid economic development now occurring in emerging nations.

Many of today's social systems, at the cultural level, have their own problems as levers of change. They can be expected to aggressively perpetuate consumerist distractions in a highly plutocratic society. As Dean Kamen notes, dominant youth heroes in today's U.S. are athletes or entertainers bent on pushing you product, individuals who certainly play a valuable role in society but who have disproportionately displaced many of the great social welfare and justice role models of science, industry, medicine, or politics that our 19th century youth idealized.

We know we are in an era of cultural poverty when dominant musical genres of the modern era celebrate sex, money, power, fame and ego in clearly simplistic terms, rather than personal advancement, global awareness, empathy, and the more nuanced human needs. This is not a tirade against modern culture, merely a recognition of one of several costs of extreme plutocracy and unilateralism in any advanced industrial nation. We can fight this to some degree, but much more effectively at the personal and small group than at the broader cultural, political, or economic levels, at least for the near term. Again, we have to be conscious of our environmental context and its natural constraints.

That leaves us with technology, the fastest growing and most dynamic segment of current society, as the major lever for affecting the problem of youth education today. While some technologies enforce the hierarchical status quo and perpetuate what scholar Richard Rhodes in Visions of Technology, 2000, calls "structural violence," many others promote openness, distributed intelligence, transparency, and other strongly democratic values. We must learn the difference, and advocate for appropriate technologies.

I see at least two powerful personal strategies for practical implementation of the technological lever on education by futurists today. The first is learning how to use technology to increase your own and your children's educational sophistication, and the second is using it to create local businesses that have, as a clear goal, the effect of increasing the intelligence, independence, wisdom and worldliness of their employees and customers, both young and old. Let me close with a few brief words on each of these strategies, to spur you into your own additional research.

For your family, you could start by reading any of a number of interesting surveys of the social effect of computing technologies, such as Don Tapscott's Growing Up Digital, 1999 (and http://www.growingupdigital.com/). Get a subscription to a few good computer magazines, like PC Magazine, or Smart Computing: In Plain English. Use the internet on a daily basis. Create a personal website. Post your digital pictures to it. Get broadband, and get your grandparents on broadband. Start having webcam phone conversations with them (Apple's iChat AV is excellent). Buy goods on eBay.com and use PayPal to support the emerging global digital marketplace for consumer goods. Sell your used goods there as well, or take them to your local AuctionDrop.com warehouse, where they'll sell them for you on eBay themselves for a small fee. Use Amazon.com to buy your books. Use Netflix.com to rent your DVDs. Try dating through a good internet relationships site like eHarmony.com. Buy your clothes through places like LandsEnd.com, who will keep your measurements online, to simplify future clothing decisions. Do your banking with an online bank, like Everbank.com. Get a penpal in a foreign country through an internet café, and support their family financially and interpersonally. Upgrade your operating system, software, and computer regularly. If you haven't already, get your kid digital.

For your business, you might start with Slywotsky and Morrison's How Digital is Your Business, 2000, or Bill Gate's Business at the Speed of Thought, 2000. Ask yourself how you can employ youth who are interested in learning information technology (IT) skills, and how you can use IT and other technologies to improve your business. Sometimes its better to spend a lot less money, a lot smarter, on slightly older technologies. Look for ways where you can replace existing processes and systems with mature, cheap, dependable technologies. Unless you are a market leader, be careful about spending money on unproven new business technologies. Watch other technology adopters carefully before you spend, and use the internet for competitive intelligence. When you are considering spending nondiscretionary income on technology for competitive advantage, always study a technology carefully first, and spend only after you understand value inherent in the older, cheaper, and more mature technologies.

Finally, if you want to understand and selectively employ some of the newest technologies that are leading us to the next generation intelligent internet, you might start with John Patrick's Net Attitude, 2001. You can also review some of my internet essays on the conversational user interface, or CUI, as mentioned earlier. A new, increasingly intelligent conversational computing infrastructure and interface is coming, both to the internet and to every device with a wireless connection, one that will arrive incrementally between now and 2025 by most estimates. Systems theory gives us every reason to expect that the CUI, personality capture, persuasive computing, and other intelligent interface technologies are going to usher in a much smarter, more self-actualized, less culturally-controlled, more democratically active, empowered youth.