The complexity of the global society and economy, and the resulting fracturing of social classes across the Midwest, the nation, and the world demand a significant expansion of the importance of human relations training courses for counselor education and for general teacher education. At the University of South Dakota at Vermillion the School of Education has committed to developing new goals for using new technologies and systems leadership theory for linking regional communities with a Central Plains Rural Human Resource and Economic Development Institute. The linkage of ideas, people, technologies, and resources focuses on providing midwesterners with the knowledge of the many-faceted and diverse global society in which the economic future is being forged. The potential for a leadership role for counselor educators, long committed to educating people about discrimination, is excellent in this model. As human relations training expands to address the economic and social contexts within which problem solving, conflict management, self-awareness, and social development occur, there will be ample opportunity for the renewal of professsional education curricula to occur on this base of knowledge. The conflicting national paradigms (U.S. supremacy versus U.S. global interdependence leadership) have kept the nation and the Midwest professional education community in turmoil for the past decade. One of these perspectives will have to dominate for progress to be made in the design of school and university curricula. (ABL)