The informational middle ages

Education in the information age, or how everything must change so that it remains the same

Abstract

In a context of strong inequality, regarding society’s access to information in regions like Latin America, schools face a dilemma that questions their purpose and function in society. As institutions produced by modernity, schools need to adapt their curriculums and methodologies in order to move into the information society of the postindustrial age. The rapid obsolescence of the kind of knowledge offered by schools leads individuals to develop their talents outside educational institutions, since knowledge is the basic good of the current informational revolution. Latin America’s new dependence is rooted precisely in the cultural impossibility of preparing the bulk of the population for the informational production model, whose foundation stone is the creation of the computer and the internet. Moreover, in the information society, learning has stopped being a solely cognitive phenomenon and has come to include a social dimension. So-called “practice communities”, because of the interaction they generate between peers, encourage the teaching-learning of informal knowledge, which arises out of personal experience. The inclusion of technology in the classroom is currently limited to the teaching of traditional content, as an attempt to more easily attract children, who in turn bear the burden of the digital native myth, which overestimates the real extent of their knowledge in the use of these devices. The change that must be made in schools implies two related and intertwined factors: internet connection in the classroom and the (constant) updating of curricular designs, keeping in mind that achieving the expected results in students’ schooling necessarily has to do with the role of the teacher.