The following is a summary of the principal ideas expressed by Luis E Alcalá in the XXVI Meeting of INTERCIENCIA Association October last. His paper is about Education, pointing specially towards the deficiencies of the Venezuelan educative system, but it also applies to other countries as well . But most important is that his work aims at calling attention to the new elements that have to be considered for Education in the near future; after all what is coming is not just a change of a century but a change of millennium.

If you are interested in receiving the whole work please write to us and we will gladly send it to you.

If development is a mental state, and if education is an institutionalized process for the acquisition and formation of mental states, then it is necessary to set forth a plan to reformulate education within a unsatisfied society.

When trying to transform the quality of teaching, it is important to consider two different dimensions of the problem. In the first place the combined elements such as methods and technics of intellectual operations that distinguish a good learner from a bad one must be approached. In the second place the contents of what is being teached has to be discussed because it is perfectly possible to learn very well what is already obsolete and unimportant knowledge.

During the years 1975-76, sponsored by the Newman Foundation an experiment took place in Venezuela. The results of where disagreeable and disappointing . A simple test that could be answered just with elementary reading and simple reasoning methods was given in an exclusive school in Caracas. The results where highly preoccupying because most of the students where incapable of carry out basic and elementary intellectual operations. If this was happening in the best schools what was to be expected in the less prestigious ones?. Another Project, Project Lambda, showed that these deficiencies could be surmounted. This project is still valid and still could be used as a strategy in solving the problem mentioned before.

As to the second dimension regarding the contents of education, it is important to note that the Venezuelan educative system teaches with orientation which is mostly behind times. Also, the only time the students can form themselves a general conception of the world --what the Germans call the Welt-anschauung-- is in high school, later when they enter the superior level of education, the University’s pensums are highly specialized and tend to achieve profound knowledge about a partial segment of the whole.

A few years ago, an interesting debate emerged in US. between academicists and government functionaries, (authorities of Stanford University and the Secretary of Education) The essence of the problem was Stanford decision to modify its basic course about Occidental Civilization. It eliminated most the canonical list of compulsory reading for the students of this course, and added new texts including subjects of non European culture, and books written by women for example. Secretary Bennet expressed his disagreement and started what is known today as the "battle of the books".

Most American universities such as Harvard and Chicago have their "canonical" list of books representing occidental civilization which underline the educative philosophy with that teachers use as instruments for the students academic formation. But each generation has a task to reevaluate tradition and to discard some of the old just as they need to incorporate new forms of thinking for the new generations, even if from a time perspective, the proximity to the authors makes this task a more difficult one.

For instance, it is not the same to think about the universe from an Israeli point of view 3.500 years ago than from a 1990 computer engineer approach. Furthermore, the accumulation of human knowledge is the basis of its future possibilities so it is clear that occidental intellectual traditions are not to be despised nor those of other cultures.

The apparent dilemma can be solved through changes of perspective. First, having the Great Books as tools with an heuristic usefulness and not as depositories of pret a porter solutions to today’s problems. And also, actual and present trends of though should be given more space in the educative system

The excuse about the incapacity for judgment on the importance of new thoughts because of their proximity in time is not valid. What this means is that they try to avoid errors in judging the importance of some work that could just be an efimerous masterpiece, also today we count with the help of abundant information and documents which were scarce in the past .This excessive information gets itself lost or disorganized so it is necessary to build an instantaneous history even if the passion it provokes is strong.

The XX century is coming to an end. This era has shown an unusual increase in complexity. Frequently we try to understand the political changes of this century highlighting these changes as an expression of the profound level of transformation of this era. But less frequent is the investigation of these changes at an ideological and gnoseological level.

We are on the brink of radical modifications of our institutionality, of our definition and meaning of the word country ,and of the relations between State and individual, and even about the limits the actual concept of State. We are challenged by the Third Wave, we are before an overwhelming agenda where the Classics are not to be disdained but they are decidedly insufficient. Superior education cannot ignore recent thinking.

With all due respect to Aristotle , Maquiavelo and Newton, the ideas that need to be placed as a nucleus of a new general culture are those of Wittgenstein, Gödel, Kuhn, Foucault, Penrose, Gell-Mann, Lovelock, Mandelbrot o Prygogine, just to mention a few.

We are entering a new millennium, a new historical age that hasn't yet found a substantive mode to refer to itself and that is why thoughts are in an adjective or "post modernistic" adverbial sort of way. Maybe someday, historians from that new era will find a way to justify the apparently integrating theories of complexity and to name the new era as the Complex Age, which it certainly seems to be.