EDUCATING CHILDREN FOR A BETTER FUTURE

Richard: I’m getting into the future and the way to get into the future is to work with children because life grows up and most of their talking to adults and by the time we convince adults that peace is a doable thing, the people you’ve convinced who are in charge are retired and they’re out of business. If we would work with children today, we would have a different world tomorrow. So I said, okay, since I’ve been retired from the Office of Education, I’m supposed to die in another ten years of a disease called sleep apnea, how can I do something worthwhile with my life before I die? 

So I said, okay, I know children are going to change the world whether we like it or not. How about giving them the decent information so they can make the right kind of choices? So we started out originally with teachers while I was at the Office of Education, exchanging material on the future using things like science fiction, NASA and training materials to give kids a good idea about what kind of careers they’re going to have because we as teachers tend to teach about the things we knew. 

I saw the Hindenburg and I’m fixed in that kind of time, you know, aviation and stuff like that. But tomorrow the doctor O’Neill with the space colonies and things—these are going to be where the new frontier. In fact, Doctor Neil and I started up The High Frontier, which is a concept of going out into space, building agricultural and television, big television next, so that we could communicate with Earth. 

Be Pitts (Interviewer): What are you doing with children? 

Richard: Directly with children is setting up clubs and schools like Future Farmers and Porridge. That allows children to play and fantasize at careers in the future and go right into the careers by using NASA training material for astronauts and converting that back into learning how to read and write. Because it’s not enough to have a fancy you’ve got to have the tools. And 90% of our kids are missing the science and the math that they have to take in junior high school, so they’re not able to compete in the hard sciences in college. We have a crisis now. Only 50% of our kids have been going into science and engineering for the last 20 years. So that now we have a tremendous deficit, so the high technology corporations are hiring the teachers. So basically, we’re eating our seed corn because we know we’ve lost 50% of our science teachers.