Looking Back: Back to the future—A look ahead from 1967 

The year was 1967: The prognosticator was Donald W. Johnson, an official with the California Department of Education. In a cover story for the California School Boards journal, the predecessor of California Schools magazine, Johnson made a series of eerily prophetic predictions about what public education would look like 20 years down the road.

“The basic problems facing mankind will be brought about by the twin explosions of population and knowledge, with all the opportunities which these produce,” Johnson wrote.

“If education is the basic tool by which people are prepared to cope with the world in which they live, the demands upon the public school system will increase both in number and complexity.”

Sound familiar?

Public education’s survival, he continued, will depend “on our collective capacity to respond to these demands.” School board members, he added, “are key individuals in this survival.”

Johnson also commented on the increasing erosion of local control over public schools. If school board members “have perceived a gradual diminution of their powers in recent years,” he advised, “they should attempt to understand the forces which have caused it.

“In simple language, the basic changes in our society are the result of national and international events, while the response mechanism used by most school districts limits the resources allocated to the solution of these resulting problems to those human and material resources possessed by the individual district.”

At the same time, he noted, districts will face increasing challenges and expectations. “The basic lesson which all of us must learn is that the individual school district is becoming increasingly less able to respond to the demands placed upon it if it depends solely upon its own resources,” he wrote.

Schools of the future, Johnson added, will offer preschool, feature multi-track schedules and have a longer school day. Public policy will increasingly focus on closing the achievement gap—or, as Johnson put it, “the need to educate minority groups more effectively.” Technology, he predicted, will explode. “The continued growth of knowledge will almost inundate us,” he wrote, “and the breakdown of a computer will be as serious as a fire in a library.”