As Peter Bishop relates, that idea came from Calvin Cannon, the founding Dean of the School of Human Sciences and Humanities at the University of Houston-Clear Lake in 1976. Cannon was interviewing Bishop for a job in sociology and statistics. Bishop recalls, “I asked about an unusual Master’s degree called Studies of the Future. [Cannon] shot back with that quote. As a ‘scientific’ sociologist, I had a lot of reasons why you couldn’t ‘teach the future,’ but I wanted the job so I kept my mouth shut.” Bishop got the job and joined the futures faculty six years later. He recently stepped down as head of that program, the world’s oldest program in strategic foresight. Today he is leading an initiative called Teach the Future to introduce futures thinking into schools and colleges around the world.

(Read more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/162233)