Fashioning the Future

Abstract

The committee planning this Conference of the Canadian Association of University Schools of Nursing, in choosing the theme, Fashioning the Future, made two assumptions. One was that the human race has a future. The second was that human beings in general and nurse educators in particular can do something significant in fashioning it or at least those parts of it that concern us most: the health delivery system, the role of nursing within it and, most specifically, the responsibilities of the nurse educator. How justified was the assumption that the human race has a future? The rise and fall of civilizations, Arnold Toynbee taught us, is the most persistent theme over the entire course of history (Toynbee, 1947). Even before the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945, this century had surpassed all others in the toppling of empires, governments, kings and presidents and in the devastation and savagery of its wars and its genocidal massacres. What reasons, then, are there to suppose that, with an atomic, or rather a nuclear, arsenal burgeoning yearly in magnitude and menace, the human race has anything more than the ghost of a chance to survive through this decade, or the next or the next?