Radically Altering the Future

As I give my last final exam today (Am I excited? YES! But kept in check by the two classes I start teaching next Monday.) I want to share a quote with you from Greenleaf's essay titled 'The Future is Now' from On Becoming a Servant-Leader. It not only grounds me in my role as teacher, but all of our roles in preparing today's youth for the future:

But the greatest foresight, the most difficult and most exciting, is the influence one wields on the future by helping the growth of people who will be in commanding positions in the next generation. One cannot bind the future to one's own wisdom. By the time any one of us has crystallized his or her wisdom so that something could be bound to it, it is out of date. Crystallized wisdom is not the essence anyhow. The character of our society and the institutions in it cannot with safety be bound to any currently held ideas, nor can they be altered radically to conform to any fixed idea of what they ought to be in the future. But the future can be radically altered by the kinds of people being prepared for the future.