PEDAGOGY IN POSTMODERNITY
PEDAGOGY IN POSTMODERNITY

Summary/Abstract: To avoid a conflict between the mentality of the society in which we live and the didactic procedures that school employs for the education of youngsters represents a fundamental challenge for the institutional authorities. Present day society needs new formulas of public and intellectual adjustment, expecting behaviours that are different from those proposed by the educational institutions. Modernity is fashioned beyond the outlines that had ensured its virtues, features in which school used to excel being now put under question. “A new (post-modern) world” has carved its place in the very body of modernity. The restless youngsters vehemently dispute the personality traits, behaviours and, most of all, the values of modernity. Post-modernity has no patience to wait respectfully to be invited among the structures of modernity. The new society is no longer satisfied with a shaping of the tree’s branches; it demands a cutting down of the whole crown, a replacement of the entire “plantation.” Post-modernity unscrupulously barges in upon modern institutions, with a mind of changing their functions and behaviours. One such institution is school, which today lacks the authority for implementing the “new education.”The generation conflict has exceeded the limits of a natural, progressive and positive contradiction. Cohabiting at the borderline of different mentalities, the generations (modern and post-modern) embrace a disjunctive attitude. The moderns would like the younger generation to take over at least part of their values, which they had also inherited and which had given them an existential satisfaction; the restless post-modern youngsters, on the other side, challenge the becoming, the options, and even the structure of the formers’ behaviours. They try to occupy “the armchair of authority before the wall-to-wall carpet has been changed,” lecturing on authority and expecting the “grown-ups” to share their temptations. They propose new guiding values, defying old ones either by ignoring them or by altering those that invoke them. The new world, with its globalizing ideas and neo-humanistic attitude, with its “wholes” built up of pieces and its disguised stories, needs a new kind of education. School today seems unable to find solutions to such a contagious and passionate behavioural aggression. We get the impression that educational institutions are desperately looking for solutions to overcome the deadlock in which they find themselves. Pedagogy has a new mission: to offer didactic paradigms and methodological ideas suited for post-modern education. The dynamism of despairs that can be witnessed in field of education, the social pressure exercised upon the pedagogical epistemology, have urged me to write the present study, even though I am aware that certain issues deserve greater attention, while others require serious reconsideration

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