I am rereading Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. This fantastic book was published in 1980. My copy was bought two years later. In 1983, when I was still Dean of the School of Education at UNICAMP, I taught an undergraduate seminar on the book (against the protest of the Educational Sociology Department that claimed I couldn’t teach that, since the book was Sociology and I didn’t have a degree in So…

ciology… The real reason was that the book was subservient to Marxist ideology and showed that Soviet Russia was basically an industrial — Second Wave — country when the US was quickly moving ahead into the Third Wave). Most students thought that the book was an exercise in futurology only. Today, almost 30 years later, as I reread the book, I see that guy wrote about the future as most people write about the past: with clarity and full conviction. Most amazingly, things have turned out basically as he predicted they would. Really unbelievable.

In São Paulo, on the 18th of November of 2012