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Educational Challenges of the Liquid-Modern Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Zygmunt Bauman
Zygmunt Bauman*
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
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Abstract

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A liquid modernity, where the traditional certainties have become fluid and blurred, presents a major challenge for education. The world is changing so quickly that homo sapiens, learning animal par excellence, can no longer rely on strategies acquired through learning experiences, let alone those derived from traditional values or wisdom. The excess of useless information creates a glut. When saturation level is reached, accumulation ceases to be a sign of wealth and becomes undesirable. Knowledge is confined - discarded like refuse - in the infinite capacity of cybercomputers. What should we humans keep and what should we reject in this process? In times of liquid modernity, how and what should our children be taught in order to be able to develop survival strategies throughout their lives?

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , February 2003 , pp. 15 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2003

References

Notes

1. Edward D. Myers, Education in the Perspective of History, New York, Harper 1960, p. 262.

2. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, London, W. W. Norton 1998, p. 62.

3. cf. Werner Jaeger, Paidea, Die Formung des griechischen Menschen, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter 1958.

4. Dany-Robert Dufour, ‘Malaise dans l’éducation’, Le Monde diplomatique, November 2001, p. 11.

5. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris, Gallimard 1999, p. 171.

6. ‘From modernism to hypermodernism and beyond’, in Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, edited by John Armitage, London, Sage 2001, p. 40.

7. Interview with Jérôme Sans, in ibid., p. 118.