Learning from ...

Foreword
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Lifelong learning and the emergence of a knowledge society—these are the buzzwords ringing in the sociopolitical utopias at the turn of the present century. In recent years, however, not only studies in all disciplines that embody efficiency as formula for success have been enjoying a boom. Anything and everything is suddenly being viewed through the lens of cost-effectiveness, with society and its institutions surveyed a new, fragmented and skeletonized, measured according to economists’ magic spells. Even education, long a sacrosanct fundamental right and a highly esteemed value of modern societies, has not escaped the reach of the autarchic economic yardsticks. Whereas in the first period of Modernism— with the evolution of industrial society—the education scene was marked by a movement toward greater formalization, today it has assumed a more reflective stance toward itself, toward others and toward the world at large, making way for an informalization of frames of reference. Nor have educational institutions remained untouched. More importance is attached today to informal learning, to learning by doing. Into which corset, then, is the all-pervasive logic of budgetary efficiency now forcing the classical educational institutions? … >>