Educating Specialists in the Context of Postmodern Citizenship: Keep Calm and Carry on

Abstract

The origin of this commentary lies in the sensation of bewilderment, pessimism and nostalgia observed in many academics and educators around the mercantilisation of higher education. The approach, however, identifies the danger of confronting an idealised past characterised by deeply engaged modernity with an individualistic, banal, postmodern present. A genealogical perspective is adopted to analyse the structural and functional continuity between those two world views. More specifically, the connection can be analysed from the social and political plan designed to encourage reflective, critical and self-governed awareness in Western citizens. A significant corollary to the clear divide drawn between social engineers and populations in the modern origin of the historic process at issue is the re-composition of that dichotomy in the form of an empowered awareness among citizens and a guilty reflective conscience among specialists and educators. From that standpoint, deprived of their traditional authority and influence on the definition of the social model, today’s academics and educators should learn to live in harmony with more cross-sectional, horizontal and complex life model management. Postmodernity should be seen not only as a source of problems and obstacles, but also of critical tools for resistance to experiment with new types of agency and social and political subjectivity.