Schools and universities are criticized for not giving students
relevant knowledge. The notion of relevance is critical here.
Scholars claim that knowledge of facts pertaining to tradition,
such as those tested in the graduating class of 1996, are
relevant. Relevant also are elements of logical thinking, enough
science in order to understand the wealth of technologies we
use, foreign languages, and other subject matter that will help
students face the world of practical experience. Although the
subjects listed are qualified as significant, they are never used
in polls of graduating students.
Critics of the traditional curriculum dispute the relevance of a
tradition that seems to exclude more than it includes. They also
challenge implicit hierarchical judgments of the people who
impose courses of study. Multiculturalism, criticism of
tradition, and freedom from the pressure of competition are
among the recommendations they make. Acknowledging the new
context of social life and praxis, these critics fail, however,
to put it in the broader context of successive structural
conditions, and thus lack criteria of significance outside their
own field of expertise.
With the notion of relevance, a perspective of the past and a
direction for the future are suggested. That literacy-based
education, at its inception, was xenophobic or racist, and
obviously political, nobody has to tell us. Individuals from
outside the polis, speaking a different mother tongue, were
educated for a political reason: to make them useful to the
community as soon as possible. Conditions for education changed
dramatically over time, but the political dimension remains as
strong as ever. This is why it can only help to dispense with
certain literate attitudes expressing national, ethnic, racial,
or similar ambitions. It is irrelevant whether Pythagoras was
Greek and whether his geometry was original with him. It is
irrelevant whether one or another person from one or another
part of the world can be credited with a literary contribution,
a work of art, or a religious or philosophic thought. What counts
is how such accomplishments became relevant to the people of the
world as they involved themselves in increasingly complex
practical experiences. Moreover, our own sense of value does not
rest on a sports-driven model-the first, the most, the best-but
on the challenge posed by how each of us will constitute his own
identity in unprecedented circumstances of work, leisure, and
feeling. Relevance applies to the perspective of the future and
to the recognition that experiences of the past are less and less
pertinent in the new context.
What should be taught? Language? Math? Chemistry? Philosophy? The
list can go on. It is indeed very hard to do justice by simply
nodding yes to language, yes to math, yes to chemistry, but not
yes wholesale, without putting the question in the pragmatic
context. This means that education should not be approached with
the aura of religion, or dogmatism, assumed up to now: The
teacher knew what eternal truth was; students heard the lectures
and finally received communion.
All basic disciplines have changed through time. The rhythm of
their change keeps increasing. The current understanding of
language, math, chemistry, and philosophy does not necessarily
build on a progression. Science, for example, is not
accumulation. Neither is language, contrary to all appearance.
Rules learned by rote and accepted as invariable are not needed,
but procedures for accessing knowledge relevant to our dynamic
existence are. To memorize all that education-no matter how
good or bad-unloads on students is sheer impossibility. But to
know where to find what a given practical instance requires, and
how one can use it, is quite a different matter.
Should square dancing, Heavy Metal music, bridge, Chinese cuisine
be taught? The list, to be found in the curriculum of many
schools and colleges, goes on and on. The test of the relevance
of such disciplines (or subjects) in a curriculum should be
based on the same pragmatic criteria that our lives and
livelihoods depend on. New subjects of study appear on course
lists due to structural changes that make literacy useless in
the new pragmatic context. They cannot, however, substitute for
an education that builds the power of thinking and feeling for
practical experiences of increased complexity and dynamism.
Education needs to be shaped to the dynamics of self-constitution
in practical experiences characteristic of this new age of
humankind. This does not mean that education should become
another TV program, or an endless Internet voyage, without aim
and without method. We must comprehend that if we demand literacy
and efficiency at the same time, ignoring that they are in many
ways incompatible, we can only contribute to greater confusion.
Higher education was opened to people who merely need training
to obtain a skill. These students receive precious-looking
diplomas that exactly resemble the ones given to students who
have pursued a rigorous course of education. Once upon a time,
literacy meant the ability to write and read Latin. Therefore,
diplomas are embellished with Latin dicta, almost never
understood by the graduates, and many times not even by the
professors who hand them out. In the spirit of nostalgia,
useless rituals are maintained, which are totally disconnected
from today's pragmatic framework.
The progressively increased mediation that affects efficiency
levels also contributes to the multiplication of the number of
languages involved in describing, designing, coordinating, and
synchronizing human work. We are facing new requirements-those
of parallelism, non-linearity, multi-valued logic, vagueness, and
selection among options. Programming, never subject to wrong or
right, but to optimal choice, and always subject to further
improvement, is becoming a requirement for many practical
experiences, from the arts to advanced science. Requirements of
globality, distribution, economies of scale, of elements
pertinent to engineering, communication, marketing, management,
and of service-providing experiences need to be met within
specific educational programs. The fulfillment of these
requirements can never be relegated to literacy.
We have seen that the broader necessity of language, from which
the necessity of literacy is derived, is not defensible outside
the process of human self-constitution. Language plays an
important role, together with other sign systems, subordinated to
language or not. In retrospect, we gain an understanding of the
entire process: natural instincts are transmitted genetically
and only slightly improve, if degeneration does not occur, in
the interaction among individuals sharing a habitat. The
conscious use of signs takes newborns from the domain of nature
and eventually places them in the realm of culture. In this
realm, life ceases to be a matter of biology only, and takes on
non-natural, social and cultural dimensions. To live as an animal
is to live for oneself and for very few others (mainly
offspring). To live as a human being is to live through the
existence of others, and in relation to others. Established
before us and bound to continue after us, culture absorbs
newcomers who not only begin their existence through their
parents, but who also get to know culture and to adapt to it, or
revolt against it.
Education starts with the experience of the absent, the
non-immediate, the successive. In other words, it implies
experiences resulting from comparisons, imitation of actions,
and formation of individual patterns corresponding to human
biological characteristics. Only much later comes the use of
language, of adjectives, adverbs, and the generation of
conventions and metaphors, some part of the body of literacy,
others part of other languages, such as the visual. With the
constitution of the family, education begins, and so does
another phase in labor division. The initial phase probably
marked the transition from a very small scale of nomadic tribal
life to the scale within which language settled in notation and
eventually in writing. The generality of sequences, words,
phonetics, nouns, and actions was reached in the practical
experience of writing. The language of drawings, resulting from
different experiences and supporting the making of objects,
complemented the development of writing. When the scale of
humankind corresponding to incipient literacy was reached,
literacy became the instrument for imparting experiences
coherent with the experience of language and its use. This
account is inserted here as a summary for those who, although
claiming historic awareness, show no real instinct for history.
This summary says that education is the result of many changes
in the condition of humankind and makes clear that these
alterations continue. They also entail a responsibility to
improve the experience of education and re-establish its
connection to the broader framework of human activity, instead
of limiting education to the requirements of cultural continuity.
It has been said, again and again, that what we are we had to
learn to become. Actually, we are who and what we are through
what we do in the context of our individual and social
existence. To speak, write, and read means to understand what
we say, what we write, and what we read. It is not only the
mechanical reproduction of words or sound patterns, which
machines can also be programmed to perform. The expectation of
speaking, reading, and writing is manifested in all human
interactions. To learn how to speak, write, and read means both
to gain skills and to become aware of the pragmatic context of
interhuman relations that involve speaking, writing, and
reading. It also means awareness of the possibility to change
this context.
To educate today means to integrate others, and in the process
oneself, in an activity-oriented process directed towards
sharing the knowledge necessary to gain further knowledge. Its
content cannot be knowledge in general, since the varieties of
practical experiences cannot be emulated in school and college.
Within the pragmatic framework that made literacy possible, it
sufficed to know how an engine functioned in order to work with
different machines driven by engines. Literacy reflected
homogeneity and served those constituted as literate in
controlling the parameters within which deviations were
allowed. The post-industrial experience, based on an underlying
digital structure, is so heterogeneous that it is impossible to
cope with the many different instances of practical
requirements. The skills to orient us towards where to find what
we need become more important than the information shared.
Ownership of knowledge takes a back seat; what counts is access,
paralleled by a good understanding of the new nature of human
praxis focused on cognition. Education should, accordingly,
prepare people to handle information, or to direct it to
information processing devices. It has to help students develop
a propensity for understanding and explaining the variety in
which cognition, the raw material of digital engines, results
from our experiences.
The unity between the various paths we conceive in projecting our
own biological reality into the reality of the world housing us
and the result of our activity is characteristic of our mental
and emotional condition. It defines our thinking and feeling. At
some moment in time, after the division between physical and
intellectual work took place, this thinking became relatively
free of the result. The abstraction of thinking, once attained,
corresponds to our ability to be in the process, to be aware of
it, to judge it. This is the level of theories. The dynamics of
the present affects the status of theories, both the way we
shape them and how we communicate them. At least in regard to the
communication of theory, but also to some of its generation, it
is worthwhile to examine, in the context of our concern with
education in this age, the evolution of the university.