VIRTUAL: Applying Education

Abstract

We face serious global-wide social and ecological challenges at the existential level. Some concerned stakeholders, such as OECD, suggest that 21st century competencies will provide solutions to vexing global challenges. We disagree. Mere skill analysis, promoted by the Anglo-American curriculum tradition, alone ignores both historical and political issues. By providing discrete skill solutions without fully investigating the onus of the problem (Bacchi 2009) curriculum tradition bypasses the critical point of whether global crises are methodological, epistemological, or ontological, and whether the solutions lay in pedagogical tools and skills, better research, or in profound changes in our relationship with the world (Andreotti et al. 2018). One line of critique worth examining asserts that the source of contemporary problems lays in humanist tradition and in a focus on anthropocentric thinking. However the main “influencer” of recent damage to our planet has not been anthropocentric thinking. Throughout history, Aristotelian tradition – here represented by Bildung traditions – has stressed development of human self-awareness, including well-grounded cultural bulwarks against the destruction of our planet. Rather, the main destructive influence has been modern natural science, which is predicated on methodological monism from a viewpoint of nature-centered thinking, scientism, and excessive reductionism (Radnitzky 1970). Another line of critique comes from decolonial thinking, emphasizing the role of the modern/colonial capitalist world system (Grosfoguel 2002), and related to onto-epistemology in creating and maintaining global problems. In this presentation we investigate what lesser-known lines of humanistic tradition and decolonial thinking await our inspection and usage and perhaps open new horizons of action and research.