New Times, New Knowledge, and Finding the ‘NorthStar’ of Success in a Changing World of Learning

Abstract

As a primordial concept of human experience, knowledge, in a broad sense, was not necessarily and always linked to learning, but rather something bestowed from on high or mysteriously granted. Throughout the eras since, education changed from an esoteric elite marker to one of pragmatic, applied ability to discover and invent. With the coming of the industrial revolution, social massification al la Marcuse followed, and with it the use of mass persuasion, for good (literacy campaigns) or ill (rank consumerism). Knowledge was thus intimately tied up with the processes of democratization and adaptation to trends increasingly related to economic and at most social competitiveness, so, in a word, the need for a programmatic and generally pragmatically oriented Learning. In other words, the accessibility of knowledge and the related methodologies of its teaching, assimilation and evaluation have become increasingly widespread. As Western (and then others) societies have followed the “knowledge society” transformation, philosophical conflicts on the essential meaning of “education” and for whom have persisted and intensified. In the coming A.I. transformation, how will mass education evolve for the many, vis-a-vis of elite esoteric education for the few? To which type of beneficiaries will it predominately serve? To a transhumanist Elon Musk, for example, or, on the contrary, much more sensitively stressed by the rigors of the new “intellectual revolution” (cf European Commission), sustainable development in a broad meaning, post-pandemic resilience and a flexible pragmatism, open to interdisciplinarity and ethical options grounded in self and civic responsibility/responsibility?