(Re)thinking education out of the box

Abstract

Despite the accelerating change at all levels of life, demanding a plethora of new intelligent systems, formal education continues to resemble a box, created during Industrial Revolution and only modestly changed since. The technicist curriculum and the public school remain a modernist project, boxing in students and constraining their imaginations. So, it is not worth investing in intelligent technologies if education is not considered, creating new flexibilities for people’s behaviours and attitudes. A paradigm shift in the area of education and teacher education will advance the fruition of the Universal Village more than any specific invention or system. The aim of this presentation is to share my concern about the inadequacy of the “black-and-white” mental organisation caused by the knowledge boundaries of various disciplines in hierarchical order, characteristic of the modernist curriculum implemented at schools, and the real need for a global and interdisciplinary methodological approach focused on the greatest problems of humanity.