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That said, the school of the 21st century requires an innovative
change of perspective, primarily by those who are “responsible” for
the school process: namely the teachers. In order to be educators,
Plato said, “
you have to love what you teach and the people whom you teach
”:
the educational work required now by the teacher is to train students
capable of learning to operate, making them exible and willing to
accept new and stimulating
input
and information, preparing them
to raise issues and problems as well as solving them. The school today
has changed extensively, hand in hand with the society we live in:
it is multicultural and often multilingual. Moreover, the continuous
and unstoppable development of the information technologies and
their increasingly easy accessibility and use helps the education itself
in forming citizens able to live and work in a globalised world, which
constantly changes our ways of thinking and perception.
Today, everyone has a guaranteed access to culture and learning.
The “circularity” of knowledge can now be implemented and it is
highly desirable. It is no longer a science or sciences reserved for
experts, but one that everyone can make their own using various
channels and social or aggregated contexts. Edgar Morin talks about
“cognitive democracy”, which according to him implies a necessary
reform of thought, that is well suited to teaching, requiring neces-
sarily the “training of the trainers” and the “self-re-education of the
educators,” educating the “educators to a complexity of thought”,
even where they nd obstacles relating to preformed mental and
institutional structures. The “cultural reform” advocated by Morin,
wants to open the way for a knowledge which is no longer fragment-
ed into individual disciplines, but capable of framing the knowledge
and information in a common collection: “
reconcile the knowledge and
discard the bridges, establish correspondences between disciplines which so
far have not been communicating between them.
” In one word: multidisci-
plinarity. The issue of central learning has certainly in uenced and
still in uences the design of the teaching activities: thorough and
lasting learning should be the primary objective for each student,
followed by the formation of intelligences able to accompany and
support them in the resolution of the complex problems. There-
fore, it is essential to invest in “competences”: the student, through
these, will be able to learn continuously throughout his/her life,
acquiring responsibility and autonomy, being aware of “know-how”,
and organising the construction of their personal pro le related to