Education Facing A Uncertain And Haisty World: Contributes For A Critical Teleological Reframing

Abstract

We first present the challenges of the endangered environment we live in, marked by growing populations, hypermobility, resource depletion, climate degradation, promising yet menacing revolutions in artificial intelligence and bioengineering, and the end of static and predictable labour markets. All of these are fragmenting our lives, leaving change as the only constant. Education is appointed as the contemporary key differentiator in developing the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that enable people to contribute to and benefit from an inclusive and sustainable future. Character qualities and soft competencies appear as part of the social dynamics that imply civic participation and trust, forming a kind of social glue, indispensable for creating an environment conducive to the attitudes and the behaviours of compromise, compliance, risk-taking, change and innovation that are needed. Secondly, we discuss the concept of competencies to show how knowledge, attitudes and values are intertwined in a complex construct, concluding that we need humanities as much as we need science and mathematics. Thirdly, we consider the teleological question as fundamental to education. Consequently, an antinomical approach to the functions of education is proposed, namely, by differentiating qualification, socialisation, and subjectification. Meaning that the educands can be given a qualification but also the opportunity to grow through socialization processes and by opening the ways to construct their subjectification, without which they will never achieve the status of being authors of their own personhood, owners of their own lives, meaning that education ought to address the empowerment and emancipation of living minds. So, the person’s emergence and affirmation are stated as the core to articulating the values of the current dominant regime and to envisaging a breakthrough to emancipatory education. Considering the issues referred, the problem of this essay could be stated as follows: “What answers are requested on the teleological realm of education when facing the challenges of our hasty world, namely regarding the competencies required, the functions of education, and especially the core problematic of the person’s emergence and affirmation.”