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Nadin, Mihai, 1938-

"The Civilization of Illiteracy"

The flawless drivers
never heard the criticism voiced by citizens concerned with
energy waste. We made students rely on cheap gasoline and
affordable cars to bring them to school and college, instead of
understanding that education needs to be decentralized,
distributed, and-why not-adapted to the communication and
interaction possibilities of our times. The Green Teens who are
active against energy waste might be well ahead of their
educational system, but still forced to go through it. Moreover,
education should be seen in the broader context of the other
changes coming with the end of the civilization of literacy: the
status of family, religion, law, and government.
While education is related to the civic status of the individual,
the new conditions for the activity of our minds are also very
important. Ideally, education addresses all the facets of the
human being. New conditions of generalized interconnection almost
turn the paradigm of continuing education into continuous
education that corresponds to changes in human experience
unfolding under even more complex circumstances. It might well
happen that for some experiences, we shall have to recuperate
values characteristic of literacy. But better to rediscover them
than to maintain literacy as an ideal when the perspectives for
new forms of ascertaining ourselves as human beings require
more, much more, than literacy.


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