Peter F. Drucker, "The Age of Social Transformation"

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:

1. To understand Drucker's argument, it is useful to make a chart of the changes he is describing. What kind of jobs dominated at the beginning of the twentieth century, at the middle, and at the end? How do the societies founded on these jobs differ?

2. In presenting his theory about how the structure of society underwent a major transformation during the twentieth century, Drucker is implicitly arguing against other ways of explaining the changes that took place during this time. As he puts it, "if this century proves one thing, it is the futility of politics." What is Drucker's view of how societies are changed and what are the alternate views that he is rejecting?

3. As Drucker looks to the future, he writes, "We can also predict with confidence that we will redefine what it means to be an educated person." What did it mean to be an educated person a hundred years ago? What does it mean to be an educated person now? And what will it mean twenty years from now?

Questions for Writing:

1. In "The Age of Social Transformation," Peter Drucker describes the rise of what he terms "the knowledge society." The essence of this new society, Drucker believes, is mobility-- "mobility in terms of where one lives, mobility in terms of what one does, mobility in terms of one's affiliations." Discuss the problems and the opportunities that are created for society as a whole by the mobility of the knowledge worker.

2. As Drucker describes it, the knowledge society is fundamentally different from the societies that preceded it because its key resource, knowledge, is "fundamentally different from the traditional key resources of the economist--land, labor, and even capital." What problems does this pose for governments and nations? What social and political innovations might we see in the twenty-first century as governments and nations attempt to respond to the emergence of the knowledge society?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:

1. Peter Drucker argues in "The Age of Social Transformation" that the emergence of the knowledge society requires that we "redefine what it means to be an educated person." Deborah Tannen, in "The Roots of Debate in Education and the Hope of Dialogue," provides an overview of what it has meant to be an educated person in the American school system up to the present time. With the arguments made by Drucker and Tannen in mind, discuss how the educational system might be reformed in the twenty-first century. How would the curriculum have to change? The teaching practices? And how would students themselves have to change?

2. What follows from claiming, as Drucker does, that the last century has demonstrated "the futility of politics"? Does it mean, for example, that there's no need to transform the system for representing the needs and concerns of the governed, as Lani Guinier called for? If politics is futile, what role are the governed to play in the knowledge society? Are efforts, like Guinier's, to improve the political system just a waste of time? Does the rise of the knowledge worker require that the ideals of democracy be transformed, abandoned, or left unchanged?

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