Post-productivist education and the challenge of extreme identities

Abstract

The current educational system’s ideological sustainability can no longer be comfortably assumed. Part of this unsustainability has to do with a now-inherent systemic instability occasioned by the rise of economically untethered identities. Unanchored from their erstwhile vocational enconcements, these vocationally free-floating identities are often characterized by the extreme worldviews associated with terrorism, wherein religious zealotry and political violence are integrated under traditional banners such as “Islamism”/“jihadism” or, less consequentially, the various Christendom-identifying white or Euro nationalisms. As educational institutions preside over the decline of previous generations’ more lifespan-durable and occupationally-enmeshed self-understandings, they increasingly find themselves unable to cope and gaze uncomprehending out at the identity tides that rise around them. There is no “solution” to this problem yet. This paper proceeds on the assumption that proper diagnosis presumably premises any plan for amelioration.