PEDAGOGYIN POSTMODERNITY

Abstract

To avoid a conflict between the mentality of the society in which we live and the
didactic procedures that school employs for the education of youngsters represents
a fundamental challenge for the institutional authorities. Present day society needs
new formulas of public and intellectual adjustment, expecting behaviours that are
different fromthose proposed by the educational institutions.
Modernity is fashioned beyond the outlines that had ensured its virtues, features in
which school used to excel being now put under question. “A new (post-modern)
world†has carved its place in the very body of modernity. The restless youngsters
vehemently dispute the personality traits, behaviours and, most of all, the values of
modernity. Post-modernity has no patience to wait respectfully to be invited among
the structures of modernity. The new society is no longer satisfied with a shaping of
the tree’s branches; it demands a cuttingdown of the whole crown, a replacement of
the entire “plantation.†Post-modernity unscrupulously barges in upon modern
institutions, with a mind of changing their functions and behaviours. One such
institution is school, which today lacks the authority for implementing the “new
education.â€The generation conflict has exceeded the limits of a natural, progressive
and positive contradiction.
Cohabiting at the borderline of different mentalities, the generations (modern and
post-modern) embrace a disjunctive attitude. The moderns would like the younger
generation to take over at least part of their values, which they had also inherited
and which had given them an existential satisfaction; the restless post-modern
youngsters, on the other side, challenge the becoming, the options, and even the
structure of the formers’ behaviours. They try to occupy “the armchair of authority
before the wall-to-wall carpet has been changed,†lecturing on authority and
expecting the “grown-ups†to share their temptations. They propose new guiding
values, defying old ones either by ignoring them or by altering those that invoke
them. The new world, with its globalizing ideas and neo-humanistic attitude, with
its “wholes†built up of pieces and its disguised stories, needs a new kind of
education. School today seems unable to find solutions to such a contagious and
passionate behavioural aggression. We get the impression that educational
institutions are desperately looking for solutions to overcome the deadlock in which 

they find themselves. Pedagogyhas a new mission: to offer didactic paradigms and
methodological ideas suited for post-modern education. The dynamism of
despairs that can be witnessed in field of education, the social pressure exercised
upon the pedagogical epistemology, have urged me to write the present study, even
though I am aware that certain issues deserve greater attention, while others require
serious reconsideration