Chapter 1: ICT In the Service of Humanism: An Optimistic Vision for the Future of Education in Postmodern Democratic Societies

This chapter connects several fundamental issues that have very rarely, if at all, been discussed by the same writers. However, as I hope the reader will be convinced upon reading the chapter, they are in fact closely linked for anyone attempting to develop systematic thinking about the desired education for postmodern democratic societies.

The argument presented and defended here can be schematically presented as follows:

1. Most modern, and even more so, postmodern, relativistic, and pluralistic Western societies, are in crisis as a result of the “lost meaning of life” they were once based on. This crisis came about due to the “Death of God” for an ever-growing number of individuals and social circles (from the seventeenth century onward) and to the postmodern collapse (from the 1960s onward) of modern ideologies that replaced God as providers of meaning for human existence. This crisis, now turned chronic, is confounding the fundamental human need for meaning and stands at the root of the malaises of modernity and postmodernity (Part 1 of this chapter).

2. This crisis has had direct and immediate implications for education in Western societies. Education has always served the predominant worldview and values of society, the same ones that provided members of society with a sense of meaning. When these values and ideologies lost their validity, the education process, which was designed to indoctrinate individuals into the intellectual and spiritual social conventions, lost its ultimate goals and become exclusively technocratic, nothing but a mechanism for preparing young people for the harsh realities of the competitive labor market. Thus, two different processes (the death of God and collapse of ideologies, and “over education”) have rendered education meaningless and prevented it from fulfilling its two primary goals: preparing young people to lead intellectually and spiritually meaningful lives and readying them for the economic realities of the labor market (Part 2).

3. The inability of traditional structures to provide the educational process with meaning does not have to render the process entirely meaningless. Human beings have a fundamental need to lead meaningful lives. The ultimate goal of education still remains: to help young people explore and evaluate this age old question of the meaning of life. This is, in fact, the literal meaning of the Latin verb “educare”: to push or pull (young people) forward—towards a satisfying and meaningful life.

4. In the last decade, the branches of computer sciences known as artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) have made huge leaps forward. While the second allows for very “live” and human-like communication from a distance, the first allows for the creation of robots or smart assistants in ways which, even now, to some extent (and to very large one in the next decade or two) far surpass human abilities for understanding, memorizing, analyzing, and comparing. These abilities are all required for the process of reflection that is basic to the Bildung process.