The Transformation of the Nature of Knowledge in Post-Industrial Society: Toward a New Paradigm of Education?

Abstract

I start from the famous scheme of historical development of our civilization by American sociologist Daniel Bell. He identified 3 main stages of such development: 1)agrarian society; 2)industrial society; 3)post-industrial society. What is the nature of knowledge at each of these stages? In agrarian society knowledge is a kind of sacred access to creation, “participation mystique” in creative activities of god or gods. If we would analyse human nature at this stage, it would be a kind of shift from “biological” to “social” nature. Or, with certain simplification, a “construction of social”. In typical industrial society this shift is successfully completed. Knowledge here is an opportunity to create and to expand a new world, which is relevant to social nature of human beings. In post-industrial society knowledge is a kind of access to “creation of creation”(or, if we use the popular term of Jean Baudrillard, creation of “simulacrums of simulation”). At this stage we have a kind of shift from “social” to “virtual” nature of human beings. This shift is enforced by expanding of Internet and modern (or postmodern) information and communication technologies. We could also call this knowledge “incomplete knowledge”, because in contemporary civilization future has a kind of ontological priority over the past and, even, over the present. The numerous literature on innovations and their crucial role in contemporary world helps to support this argument. And here we come to the necessity of creation of new paradigm of education, which would reflect these changes of nature of knowledge and human nature together with the other important attributes of nowadays reality (for example, the phenomenon of “overcoming the national” and “origin of the global” is specially interesting for me). I want to identify the main features of this new paradigm of education in my presentation.