L'apprendimento permanente nell'era della globalizzazione: la sfida planetaria della conoscenza

Abstract

In today's context of the advanced industrial society a new social structure is being carried out beyond national borders and regional areas and is spreading throughout the world thanks to Infor-mation and Communication Technology : this technological production is contributing in a decisive way to the affirmation of the Information Society , in which the driving force for social organisation is the "electronical machine", as an immaterial prosthesis that multiplies the possibilities of human knowledge and generates the Knowledge Society. It represents a substantial change in the social organisation of knowledge that modifies the structure of (material and immaterial) goods produc-tion and the structure of the social management of knowledge even more so. This does not just concern the utopia of specialized education, inherited from the last century. The Lifelong Learning global strategies rely on a possible and necessary planning activity: the Knowledge Society has Information and Communication Technology and Good Practices at it's disposal in order to build knowledge and competences to realise, on a broad scale, lifelong learning forms for individual and groups that, by valorising personal knowledge, can guarantee the liberation of knowledge po-tential and, with this, levels of diffused intellectuality and collective human self-fulfilment, never previously tested. In this context, the specialized and elitist intellectual is no longer required but we need more "relational diffused intellectuals": their work goes from linear and sector logics to articulate and global logics; it can't be solely limited to a specialized minority but must be distribu-ted in order to create a citizenship which is active and open but also aware and cultured.