Is it all the fault of the moon? Pedagogy in a world out of control

Abstract

The world seems to be out of control and for every social problem more education is proposed. Yet today, education and social development are travelling at different speeds, in spite of the fact that the former is set up to create professions which produce income as a function of consumption. In the meantime, artificial intelligence is making many of the school and university curricula obsolete. As John M. Keynes had predicted ninety years ago, we will have more free time and schools will have to teach us how to spend it wisely. In fact, the current pedagogical models refer to a humanity that is rapidly transforming, one which is living contemporarily in the distinct but integrated realities: physical, virtual, and augmented/enlarged, determined by the ever more intense hybridization of man and machine. In all this, the prevalent dimension is represented by cyberspace and not by traditional school and home environments. Hence, it is fundamental to seriously rethink the current educational theories and practices and restore/reinstate some of the intuitions of the radical pedagogies of the 1960s. Ultimately, for humankind to continue to be master of its own destiny, we must quickly rethink education, which is deeply in crisis not because of “the fault of the moon”, but rather because of specific political choices that have considered education as a social cushion. This essay proposes the urgency to accelerate the modification of educational policies since we can longer live off the fat of the land.