We are publishing an excerpt from Mario Caligiuri’s book entitled “Disregarded responsibility. The University of Calabria and pedagogy: educational policies and underdevelopment in the West” with the preface by Giovanni Lo Storto
04/28/2024
Broadening our gaze, the problem of the role of universities in the 21st century emerges, particularly in our country. Juan Carlos de Martin argues that the universities of the future must train citizens and not just workers. Despite the obvious theoretical sharing, it seems appropriate to highlight at least three considerations.
First of all, with the use of artificial intelligence there will be fewer and fewer workers, so schools and universities will have to educate citizens more than at work on a productive and advantageous use of free time, for themselves and society, teaching not so much how you work but how you live. And this would require an even higher educational challenge, recalling the need to educate citizens to manage artificial intelligence systems both in their work and in their daily actions.
Secondly, the current system doesn’t even fully train workers: I wish it did. Not only has the disconnect between education and employment been experienced for decades in Italy, but the immediate future scenarios require skills that the current educational systems largely do not ensure and of which there is no awareness. In fact, Yuval Noah Harari claims: Since we don’t know what structure the job market will have in 2030 or 2040, today we already don’t have the faintest idea of what to teach our children. Most of what they learn in school today will likely be irrelevant by the time they are forty […] the only way for men to stay in the game will be to continue learning throughout their lives, and constantly reinvent themselves. Many, if not most, will not be able to keep up.
Third, how is it possible to educate citizens in universities if we are inundated with misinformation and the education system does not provide the basic skills to develop critical thinking? Can the university offer qualified degrees if the educational background has such glaring previous deficiencies? In Italy, in my opinion, the debate has been distorted by some ideological visions and by a debate focused almost exclusively on economic resources, which, although representing a fundamental aspect, are not the only element to consider. And this especially when the funds are spent badly, expanding the number of degree courses, entrenching themselves on positional income, recruiting staff who are sometimes inadequate.
In fact, what Luigi Monti claims for schools certainly applies to the university: The whining attacks against right-wing scholastic policies and their bureaucratic and corporate vision can easily be liquidated by sending them back to the sender. In the broken and endless vortex of small technocratic adjustments to the clear failures of the school it is now clear that the right and the left have nothing to do with it […]: the basic pedagogical continuity between the ministries that have followed one another in the last decades […] it’s disarming. Even Italian universities largely miss the epochal change of pace required by the advent of the infosphere. Mark Taylor already highlighted in 2009: The majority of degree courses offered by US universities churns out a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develops skills that are the subject of continually decreasing demand (research results are published in academic journals that no one reads except a handful of colleagues who have similar interests).
So much so that there are those who predict that traditional universities may undergo heavy downsizing by 2030, with the dismissal of staff following the expansion of the online academic offering, among which, albeit with contradictions, the Massive Open Online Courses emerge. (MOOC), provided free of charge by the most important universities in the world. But as regards online universities, as they have developed in Italy, urgent interventions are needed, depending on the increasingly important role they will assume in the immediate future. Furthermore, at a national level, student emigration from the South to the North has significant impacts on the economy of the regions, as demonstrated by the studies of Gianfranco Viesti and Gaetano Vecchione
