A perspective of dental education in the twenty-first century

With the beginning of the twenty-first century only twelve years away, it is clearly not too early for dental educators to be planning for it. If one compares the practice of dentistry and the nature of dental education in 1888 with that of 1988, and then tries to project what they will be like in the year 2088, we have a difficult task indeed. As Alvin Toffler has pointed out in his book Future Shock, we are in an ever escalating period of change. Dentistry and dental education will change much more in the next one hundred years than they have in the last one hundred years.