Education and Faith between Old and New Utopias Cover Image

L’educare e il credere tra vecchie e nuove utopie
Education and Faith between Old and New Utopias

Author(s): Flavio Pajer
Subject(s): Sociology of Education, Sociology of Religion
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Papieskiego Jana Pawła II w Krakowie
Keywords: education; faith; the modern and post-modern utopias

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses three problematic knots. The fi rst one underlines how the modern utopias are not dead, but they have strikingly moved: the modern ideal of freedom, for example, changed into the post-modern ideal of security; the monism of values shared in common turned into a pluralism of personal, discontinuous and fragmented choices. The second knot identi fi es education itself as an evolving utopia: from the post colonial dream of education for all to the present priority to educate ex novo the social links in a globalised world; from the society of knowledge (instrumental good) to a pluralistic society of living together (structural good). The third knot calls to mind the classical eschatological hendiadys of the “already and not yet” that the theology of Christian Hope propose once more as the paradigm of the human living. In the - political and at same time mystic-dynamic of the historical present, dissuading in this way the believers from looking for the salvation in easy and utopian projections beyond this world.