There are important changes taking place in American society. We do not face simply the now familiar syndrome of "future shock" generated by technology and information coming faster than we can handle or absorb it. Nor is it any longer a matter of popular culture imposing constant new challenges to our sensibilities.

The changes of which I speak are demographic, and they reveal the emerging reshaping of American society. The first set of facts is transitory: The Baby Boom of the period from 1946 to 1962 is passing through, and for a very long time we will live in a society that is disproportionately old after decades of being unusually youthful.

The second set of facts is permanent: The ethnic profile of the United States is changing dramatically, and that change will continue. The United States we have known will not be what it was during its first two centuries. We are entering a period of being less Western in our ethnic and cultural makeup. The questions that arise from such changes will force us to think more carefully about the Western values that should be preserved.

I.

On the demographic changes, let me use the recent excellent study, All One System, compiled and written by Harold L. Hodgkinson and published just a few months ago by the Institute for Educational Lead­ership. Hodgkinson groups his information into five categories: Births, Age, Family Status, Regions, and Education. (I should point out that Hodgkinson is aware of the limitations of his discipline. He first quotes Kenneth Boulding in saying that " 'of all the social sciences, demographics is most like the science of celestial mechanics'—we look for the huge unseen engines that make social systems work in certain ways.")

I. Births. ". . . some groups have a lot more children than others." A group needs a rate of 2.1 children per female to stay even; that is the fertility level of Puerto Rican women in the U.S. at present. Cubans are at 1.3, however, and whites are at 1.7, while blacks are at 2.4, and Mexican-Americans at 2.9.

2. Age. Differential rates of fertility result in the swelling and contracting of age groups up the bar graphs used to measure such things. The average white American is 31, the average black is 25, the average Hispanic but 22. Such age groupings or cohorts show up in school enrollments: Six states (including California and Texas) now have 35 percent or more minority enrollments, and eleven (including New York, Florida, and Illinois) have between 25 and 35 percent.

3. Family Status. "In 1955," Hodgkinson writes, "60% of the households in the U.S. consisted of a working father, housewife mother, and two or more school age children. In 1980, that family unit was only 11% of our homes, and in 1985 it is 7%, an astonishing change." Hodgkinson makes a further point:

"The Census tells us that 59% of the children born in 1983 will live with only one parent before reaching age 18—this now becomes the NORMAL childhood experience. Of every 100 children born today:

• 12 will be born out of wedlock

•  40 will be born to parents who will divorce before the child is 18

•  5 will be born to parents who separate

•  2 will be born to parents of whom one will die before the child     reaches 18

•  41 will reach age 18 'normally'."

4. Regions. The nation will, despite the shift to the sun belt and other phenomena, remain "eastern­oriented—that is, 80% of the population will live in the Eastern and Central time zones, and only 20% will live in the Mountain and Pacific time zones, at least through the year 2000.

5. Education. The bulk of Hodgkinson's paper is about the consequences for education of these demographic changes. He points out that there is a perceptual change in the way he is trying to look at education here. Rather than talking in terms of elementary and secondary schools and four-year undergraduate colleges, he is defining the school in terms of the people who are moving through it. Here are some of the educational consequences of the demographic changes:

More children entering school from poverty households

More children entering school from single-parent households

More children from minority backgrounds

More "latch-key" children

Fewer white middle-class, suburban children

Hodgkinson gave me a further revealing fact: there are now more Muslims than Episcopalians in the United States. (After learning that, I happened to look at the religious affiliations of the members of Congress: there are 67 Episcopalians, and no Muslims.) Immigrants and refugees are arriving in the United States in the largest numbers in fifty years. For the first time in our history, most of the new arrivals are non-European.

My first point is that there are major demographic changes taking place in the United States. Some of these changes are ethnic in character. As Milton Gordon of the University of Massachusetts has suggested, the Anglo-European dominance of American society may begin to give way to other influences.

My second point will be that these changes are not unique to the United States. The examples I will cite include France, the Soviet Union, the world of Islam, and the African nation of Cameroon.

II.

A. France

You may have read that the weekly magazine Le Figaro (a rough journalistic equivalent to Life and the Saturday Evening Post) has published a demographic analysis of France carrying the title "Will We Still Be French in 30 Years?" The point of the article—at least in the words of the magazine's editor—is that dramatic changes are taking place in France that must be talked about openly and candidly. The changes are in the demographic profile of France itself. The editor says that the foreign-born population now on French soil is largely of Mediterranean and African origin and is 90 percent Islamic in culture and religion.

The authors of the article and the editors of the journal have been denounced by members of the French cabinet as being racist in intent, and the article as being statistically insupportable in any event. The rates of change have been deliberately exaggerated, these voices say, and other factors, especially poverty and lack of education, are minimized or ignored. The political character of the debate is heightened by the rapid rise to public prominence of Jacques Le Pen, leader of the party called the National Front. Le Pen, a rightist with many qualities reminiscent of the chauvinism of the 1930s, says that France's two most serious problems are crime and immigration and that the two are related.

Flora Lewis, the New York Times European correspondent, has been writing frequently about this new phenomenon in France and elsewhere; one recent article of hers was entitled "Race Issues in Europe."

Lewis's point is that France and Britain are entering a period of disruptive social change—disruptive largely because of their relative inexperience in dealing with ethnic groups within. "Racism," she writes, "which many Europeans thought was a peculiar fault of Americans, has developed in countries that believed they were above it without noticing that they took national identity as one race for granted." American success in dealing with racial tension is now being looked to by Europeans as a guide to solving Europe's problems.