L'educazione nell'età della tecnica. La prospettiva post-umanista e le implicazioni pedagogiche della crisi dell'antropocentrismo

During the second half of the 20th century, several different theoretical approaches inside both philosophy and human sciences undermined humanistic and anthropocentric western tradition. These approaches offered a renewed perspective on human beings and their relationships with the non-human world. In doing this, they gained also from the international debate among several other disciplines, such as ecology, robotics, cybernetics, systems theory, complexity epistemology, structuralism, poststructuralism, ecocentrism, biocentrism, zoocentrism, ecofeminism, and – more recently – actor-network theory and post-human, just to mention a few. As a result, they took the distance from human-centered perspectives, which look at human beings as the only center of their concerns. According to anthropocentrism, human beings are unique, specials, privileged, separated, opposed to non-human entities and superior than them. This way of representing humans is no longer considered as adequate to contemporary globalized, multiethnic, hi-tech societies in which several technological, scientific, cultural, and existential changes deeply and quickly modified our way of living and thinking. Particularly, post-human is one of the most debated and controversial, and at the same time original and promising, interdisciplinary perspectives at present day. It considers the technological background behind contemporary changes, and moreover take a second critical look to the relationship between humans and the non-human world. Post-human tends indeed to go beyond ontological, epistemological, and ethical anthropocentrism that still influences the way in which we interpret the relationship between humans and – biological and mechanic – otherness. It also helps in switching the focus of several disciplines from humans to the relationships between humans and the non-human world. For this latter reason especially, it is one of the most important approaches to the rethinking of pedagogy outside of the humanistic framework. It can also help in providing solutions to the crises that affect the discipline nowadays. Moving into this debate and acknowledging the historical and cultural background of the age of technology, in my research I analyze and deconstruct philosophical assumptions and pedagogical implications of anthropocentrism. I then explore ethical and epistemological values that post-human can have for education. Drawing on both Riccardo Massa’s thought and post-human pedagogical studies, I also present a theoretical approach to redefine the main object of pedagogy in a world in which the rise of techno-science is parallel to the decline of humanistic tradition. Thus, education can be described as a particular network (or “dispositif”) produced by the dynamic interaction of both human and non-human elements, which should endorse a non-anthropocentric ethic.