Nineteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The anthropological transformation we are undergoing shows the urgency of rethinking teaching and training, underlining the substantial inadequacy of our schools and universities in dealing with hypercomplexity, with the global extension of all political, social, and cultural processes, and with their indeterminateness, interdependence, and interconnection. The idea that educational processes are questions of a purely technical and/or technological nature, solely a problem of skills and know-how, is the “great mistake” of the hypertechnological society, based on the illusion of being able to measure, simplify, and quantify everything, to eliminate error and unpredictability, to achieve total control and rationality. It is necessary to rethink education radically because the extraordinary scientific discoveries and the dynamics of the new technologies have completely overturned the complex interaction between biological and cultural evolution, doing away with the borders between the natural and the artificial, leading us not towards simplification, but in quite the opposite direction.