A. Levintov

The Impending Educational Paradigm: A Future Without A Future?

Our modern paradigm of civilization is apparently coming to a close: the polyprocess of socio-cultural transferal is undergoing a change in the base process, such as current development in the widest sense of the word: development itself, entrepreneurship, projection, programming and a general orientation on the future, the resources for which are the present and the past. We are not able to control and master the consequences of the realization of our projects (environmental problems); the existing system of providing for territories and operations is nearing saturation (infrastructure problems); global ontological unity and the uniqueness of that understanding have been lost (existential and hermeneutical problems); and creative potential is nearing exhaustion (developmental problems).

Development, design paradigm and projectionary thought is being replaced by education as the leading polyprocess within the greater process of cultural transferal. Education and its institutions have already become a critical business in the most advanced countries.

What will remain of education upon its transformation into the dominant civilizing process, and what new aspects will it have to offer?

Unchanged will be the three crucial educational processes: enlightenment (transferal of knowledge as the basis of thought), upbringing (values and cultural mores as the basis for behavior) and training (acquisition of skills for practical activities). Naturally, the results (products) of the aforementioned processes will remain: art as a product of enlightenment, will as a product of upbringing and mastery as a product of training, while the most important combination of these results will be mastery in art and art in mastery, expertise (a phenomenon combining mastery and will) and virtuosity (the combination of will and art).

The critical change in the educational process will be the exchange of educational functions (from cultural education to conservation) and the deconstruction of knowledge down to its “informational essence,” where knowledge is indistinguishable from facts and as easily accessible.

The aforementioned fundamental changes will lead to the following consequences:

Education will be transformed from a weapon and object of power into power itself;

Educational policy will become primary across the entire political spectrum of society;

Education will become intellectual slavery;

Education will also become cultural slavery, already denounced by Nietzsche at the end of the 19^th century;

At last, the new education will slam the door on the idea of a future created by people, leaving only a shell of a calendar-based and literate tomorrow.