Fundació Jaume Bofill Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)

Thinking about future challenges of education in Catalonia

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A New Paradigm in Education


About the speaker

Alain Touraine

21/11/05 07.30 pm

French Sociologist

During the first centuries of its modernisation, the West described and thought of social reality in political terms: order and disorder, monarch and nation, people and revolution. Then, with the Industrial Revolution, capitalism emancipated political power. We think and act, then, with respect to a new social and economic paradigm, and we talk in terms of class, wealth, inequality and redistribution.

Today, in the age of the global economy and ferocious individualism, modernisation has smashed up the old models of society. Each of us, immersed in mass culture and production, makes every effort to escape them and build ourselves as the subject of our own lives. The new paradigm that brings our attention to these new concerns is cultural and educational. This can be seen in the most important questions of our times: What place should minorities be given? Should sexuality take centre stage? Are we witnessing the return of religion?

The former paradigms were aimed at conquering the world; whereas we are the protagonists of this new paradigm, and whilst we witness the coming apart of a universe led by men, we enter a society of women.


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