Education, wrote Margaret Mead in 1943, creates a “drama of discontinuity” between parents and children in modern life. By encouraging children to be different from their parents, education holds forth the possibility, unknown to traditional societies, of introducing new values, even bringing new worlds into being. The dark side of this possibility is that education can degenerate into “techniques of power,” teaching through indoctrination and locking the future into coercive relations of superiority and inferiority while conditions of life change in other respects. To avoid such a prospect, she argued, education should be placed at the service of learning instead of manipulation, spontaneity instead of control. A proper use of the discontinuity between parent and child would be to “devise and practice a system of education which sets the future free.”