The Role Of Neo-Humanism In Education

Smith (2003, p. 489) argues that ‘when the lines between knowledge and misrepresentation become completely blurred in the public mind, then education as a practice of civic responsibility becomes very difficult’. Fundamental to the new popular education systems is the replacement of the expected instillation of ‘facts’ to be learned and assessed with a genuine dialogic education (Cole, 2004). Such a dialogic process needs to be distinguished from the postmodernist notion of multivocality where ‘anything goes’ and all that is on offer is deconstruction.

Education is closely interwoven with business and industry these days. More than ever, students must perform in a real life context by solving real life conundrums. The different educational

Neo-Humanism often goes in tandem with an evolutionist view on the past which implies that we have "progressed" beyond the enigmas and constrictions which blinded our ancestry, but are senseless to our posterity. Overwhelmed by a fragmentary, materialistic and quantitative outlook hypermodern science is set back by its epistemological base. The superficial "impersonality" and "objectivity" of modern science should not mislead us to the conclusion that it is and must be anthropomorphic in its axioms. Regardless of the fact that how inhuman it defines both man and the universe it comes true that the criteria and instruments which designate this science are purely human-induced and it is the human knowledge and the human mindsets which decide modern science. As long as education attempts to guide human beings to some aspired goals, it requires to be

Modern educational institutions and organizations are highly creative of hypermodernity, the evolvement of technical rationality and militarization of knowledge (Atkinson, 2004; Benn & Chitty, 1996). These arguments fit well with the tenets of chaos theory. Chaos theory reminds us that complex systems have the ability to create order out of chaos. This is the case at a balancing point, called the ‘edge of chaos’. At the edge of chaos, the system is in a kind of suspended vacillation between stability and total dissolution into chaos (Cohen & Stewart, 1995). At this point, almost any factor can push the system into one or other direction. However, complex systems at the edge of chaos have the ability to spontaneously self-organize themselves into a higher order; in other words the system ‘evolves’ automatically into a new status of existence (Cohen & Stewart, 1995). Yet, preparation of students to prosper in chaotic systems in the hypermodern time is a transformation that may not be achieved without critical thinking or future competencies or without destructing borders that make us separate and