Training geophysicists for the future

Abstract

Students need to be trained not only for today but also for the future. When the students of today retire from their profession, the calendar will have passed the year 2,000. The question will more and more be what teachers gave them: not for the nineteen-sixties, but for the seventies, eighties and nineties. Much of what is being taught today or tomorrow will by then have been proven to be either superfluous or insufficient. Teachers can be forgiven for not having prepared students for developments which could not be foreseen. However, they will be seriously criticized, and correctly so, if they do not recognize the first signs of future needs and trends, or, even worse, if they do not wish to accept and evaluate new directions when they first appear.