How unique is change in our times?

When it comes to digital writing in the classroom, one thing we seem able to agree on is that we are in a state of change. As teachers, we are faced with deciphering not just how we can help students to meet future literacy demands but what those future demands will be.

I have started reading Literature as Exploration by Louise Rosenblatt, originally published in 1938. Rosenblatt opens chapter one with the statement “In a turbulent age, our schools and colleges must prepare the student to meet unprecedented and unpredictable problems” (1995, p. 3).

This reminded me of Alfred North Whitehead’s statement at about the same time (1933) that for the first time in human history the time-span of important change was considerably shorter than that of a single human life. The old assumption was that people would raise and educate their children to live amid conditions essentially like their own, but Whitehead’s new realization was that “our training must prepare individuals to face a novelty of conditions” (Whitehead, 1938, pp. 92-93).

So I have to ask, Does every generation feel its time is more pivotal, more consequential, and perhaps more stressed than any before it? Rosenblatt and Whitehead were writing at a time when, as Rosenblatt states, “democracy was threatened from without” (p. xv). That observation might apply to our own post-911 era. In addition, we are absorbed by the effects of powerful emerging technologies that seem to shrink our world and obliterate familiar barriers--witness Iran's Twitter Revolution or the current cellphone based fundraising efforts for Haiti. Nevertheless, between 1920-1939, radio came to inhabit 80% of American homes. Can that possibly have had any less effect on the social habits of Americans, or their relationship with increasingly powerful manmade tools?

What is it about our time that makes the nature or degree of change unique?