In a knowledge society, the more knowledge there is available, the better. However, Ralph Hertwig, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, also considers deliberate ignorance to be useful and, sometimes, even necessary. In a digital world of information overload, he also pleads for conscious critical ignoring. Smart ignorance, alongside critical thinking, can even serve as a didactic concept.
Heike Bauer helps companies make their transformation to New Work. For her, however, there is a lot more meaning in the term: she also links it to the parallelism of activities, the flexibility of biographies and, not least, an attitude critical of growth-oriented capitalism. In this sense, New Work is, for her, a necessity for dealing with the future.
Assâad El Akremi is an active researcher in organisational development in the Occitania region of France and is the co-author of the book “La société flexible” published 20 years ago. One of its chapters explains that flexibility is used for the purpose of control that a company can exercise on its employees. Is this still the case today? And how is the issue being addressed now and how will it be addressed in the future?
Metaphors (Denkbilder) and storytelling can be instruments for thinking about the future. This is what cultural scientist Elisabeth Bronfen suggests. In the first months of the Covid pandemic, she wrote a book about how fiction could have prepared us for the crisis, and why we were still not prepared anyway.
Chris Bühler is a digital ethicist. He deals with economic and social issues under the premise of digitality and the increasingly dense interconnectedness of our world. As a coach, he offers companies and individuals guidance for digital transformation. He is sceptical about buzz words like flexibility and disorientation and pleads for calmness in an anxious period.
We seem to have arrived at a learning culture where the individual enjoys the greatest possible freedom of design. But this freedom is more appearance than reality. With Foucault, Professor of Adult Education Ulla Klingovsky debunks the «brave new learning culture».
Rather, we seem to be caught in a system of self-optimisation, which adult education also serves. Klingovsky, on the other hand, pleads for adult education in the service of a «people’s enlightenment».
The physicist and philosopher Eduard Kaeser is one of the most important voices in Switzerland to speak out about our relationship with artificial intelligence (AI). He considers our progressive enmeshment with machines a fundamental problem. However, he explains, the educational challenge against this backdrop is to «learn who we are».
Paolo Bianchi and Gabrielle Schmid are both lecturers and creative coaches at the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK. They teach CAS Creationship, a program that is not aimed at artists but at people who want to pursue an innovative project with the help of creative methods. In this interview they look into the question of how creativity can be promoted.
Today’s societies are confronted with enormous problems. Jyri Manninen, Finnish researcher and adult educator, is convinced that these problems can only be solved if people, organisations and whole societies learn to reflect on their behaviour and understand complex interrelationships.
Erik Haberzeth takes up the cudgels for traditional educational institutions at a time when virtual learning rooms are being talked about everywhere.