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Conclusion: The Entrepreneurial Society 265

universities are built goes back three hundred years and more. Now
new, in some cases radically new, thinking and new, in some cases rad-
ically new, approaches are required, and on all levels. Using comput-
ers in preschool may turn out to be a passing fad. But four-year-olds
exposed to television expect, demand, and respond to very different
pedagogy than four-year-olds did fifty years ago. Young people head-
ed for a “profession”—that is, four-fifths of today’s college students—
do need a “liberal education.” But that clearly means something quite
different from the nineteenth-century version of the seventeenth-cen-
tury curriculum that passed for a “liberal education” in the English-
speaking world or for “Aligemeine Bildung” in Germany. If this chal-
lenge is not faced up to, we risk losing the fundamental concept of a
“liberal education” altogether and will descend into the purely voca-
tional, purely specialized, which would endanger the educational
foundation of the community and, in the end, community itself. But
also educators will have to accept that schooling is not for the young
only and that the greatest challenge—but also the greatest opportuni-
ty—for the school is the continuing relearning of already highly
schooled adults.
So far we have no educational theory for these tasks. So far we
have no one who does what, in the seventeenth century, the great
Czech educational reformer Johann Comenius did or what the Jesuit
educators did when they developed what to this day is the “modern”
school and the “modern” university. But in the United States, at least,
practice is far ahead of theory. To me the most positive development
in the last twenty years, and the most encouraging one, is the ferment
of educational experimentation in the United States—a happy by-
product of the absence of a “Ministry of Education”—in respect to
the continuing learning and relearning of adults, and especially of
highly schooled professionals. Without a “master plan,” without
“educational philosophy,” and, indeed, without much support from
the educational establishment, the continuing education and profes-
sional development of already highly educated and highly achieving
adults has become the true “growth industry” in the United States in
the last twenty years.

The emergence of the entrepreneurial society may be a major turn-
ing point in history.
A hundred years ago, the worldwide panic of 1873 terminated the
Century of Laissez-Faire that had begun with the publication of Adam