Memetic Engineering for Permanent Education in Line with Sustainable Growth

Abstract

Given the recent point of view of the European Commission regarding the implementation of a new strategy for sustainable growth and jobs, this paper emphasises the opportunity and urgency of supporting the EU 2020 strategy, providing an appropriate educational tool for the knowledge society. The main objectives are: a. adapting memetic engineering expressed in terms of General System Theory to the teaching component of permanent education based on bounded rationality and Just in Timeas key tools for fighting cognitive chaoplexity in the post-industrial era; b. facilitating the use of memetic engineering based on its double-faceted nature: as both positive and negative feedback; c. extending the applicability of memetic engineering to ecology as source of memes; d. exemplifying the above in primitive metamodels applying memetic engineering in ecology and highlighting the relevant design-space dimensions. Among the conclusions: a. to be sustainable in the long run permanent education must be modelled in line with learner bounded rationality, since bounded rationality is a psychological lasting feature; b. sustainable development depends on affordable permanent education; c. as a result, e-teaching should be systematically revisited through intense transdisciplinary research.