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A Global Perspective: A King Tide for Guided Inquiry 7 its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imag- ine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. Our age is such a period of transformation. (Drucker, 1992, p. 1) Peter Drucker was one of the first to write about the exponential change that defines the present day (and has defined the present day for quite some time). Our “new world” is characterized by the revolutionary impact of globablization and technology resulting in a need to transform education to meet a world fundamen- tally altered. Since Drucker’s (1992) pioneering work focused on the needs of industry for knowledge workers, there has been a slow move toward at least enriching an industrial model of education (Robinson, 2010), in favor of education systems that produce people who can think creatively, research effectively, problem-solve, and work in teams. These are the essence of the much-defined 21st-century skills, and they are also the skills of GI. Concentration on, and the need for, 21st-century skills is the first element in the waxing of the tide of circumstances favoring GI on a global scale. CHANGE IN EDUCATION SYSTEMS Tucker (2012b) analyzed Vivien Stewart’s (2012) A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models and Excellence and Innovation. Stewart points to fundamental change of a kind that rarely occurs, with examples including: • The Chinese education system, devastated by Mao Zedong, undertaking massive educational reform, insisting on all students being equipped to deal with modern society, to become one of the top education powers in the world • Singapore using education and job training as the basis of its vault into the top ranks of the industrial nations • Finland, which regularly sits at the top of the Programme for International Stu- dent Assessment (PISA) rankings and has virtually ignored movements in educa- tional change, choosing instead to focus on the quality of teaching Tucker (2012b) asserts that in each case, educational change has been driven by a belief that a high-quality education is the right of every child, not just an elite. POINTS OF VIEW ON GLOBAL CHANGE AND ITS IMPACT ON EDUCATION What follows is a range of points of view, broadly chronological, on the nature of global change, its impact on education, and the best way to respond to it, in terms of reform of education. The Knowledge Economy—Peter Drucker In Drucker’s view (1992), knowledge is at the center of the economy and is the indi- vidual’s worth in the workplace. It is knowledge that underlies every organization,