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According to sociologist William F. Ogburn, the family – under the pressures of urbanization and industrialization – was stripped of many of its traditional functions until its only remaining functions were psychological: "to socialize children and to provide emotional sustenance and support for family members."

For example, it wasn’t long after astronauts and cosmonauts orbited the earth that they realized ballpoint pens would not work in space. And so some very smart people went to work solving the problem. It took thousands of hours and millions of dollars, but in the end, they developed a pen that could write anywhere, in any temperature, and on nearly any surface. But how did the astronauts and cosmonauts get along until the problem was solved? They simply used a pencil.

Let us simplify our lives a little. Let us make the changes necessary to refocus our lives on the sublime beauty of the simple, humble path of Christian discipleship—the path that leads always toward a life of meaning, gladness, and peace.

The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments. Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.

there always seemed to be a close connection between his patients' dreams and their mental abnormalities

constant connection between some part of every dream and some detail of the dreamer's life during the previous waking state

both individuals and societies needed to learn how to adapt to and manage the sources of over-rapid change.

Possibly the best section in the book is that on education. Here he advanced a powerful critique: ‘what passes for education today, even in our ‘best’ schools and colleges, is a hopeless anachronism.’ He then added: for all this rhetoric about the future, our schools face backwards towards a dying system, rather than forwards to an emerging new society. Their vastenergies are applied to cranking out Industrial Men - people tooled for survival in a system that will be dead before they are. (2) The thesis was then advanced that the prime objective of education should be to ‘increase the individual’s ‘cope-ability’ - the speed and economy with which he can adapt to continual change.’ (3) Central to this was ‘the habit of anticipation’. Assumptions, projections, images of futures would need to become part and parcel of every individual’s school experience.