The Debates on Education are an initiative of the Jaume Bofill Foundation and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, geared to the promotion of social debate on the future of education. [+]
Abstract
During the first centuries of its modernisation, the West described and thought of social reality in political terms: order and disorder, monarch and nation, people and revolution. Then, with the Industrial Revolution, capitalism emancipated political power. We think and act, then, with respect to a new social and economic paradigm, and we talk in terms of class, wealth, inequality and redistribution.
Today, in the age of the global economy and ferocious individualism, modernisation has smashed up the old models of society. Each of us, immersed in mass culture and production, makes every effort to escape them and build ourselves as the subject of our own lives. The new paradigm that brings our attention to these new concerns is cultural and educational. This can be seen in the most important questions of our times: What place should minorities be given? Should sexuality take centre stage? Are we witnessing the return of religion?
The former paradigms were aimed at conquering the world; whereas we are the protagonists of this new paradigm, and whilst we witness the coming apart of a universe led by men, we enter a society of women.
Keywordssociety, individualism, culture, education, multiculturalism
Alain Touraine was born in 1925 in Hermanville-sur-Mer, France. He studied at the universities of Columbia, Chicago and Harvard; and was a researcher at the French National Research Council until 1958. In 1956, he founded the University of Chile’s Centre of Labour Sociology Studies. In 1960, he was made a senior researcher at the 'École Pratique des Hautes Études' (what is now Paris’s prestigious College of Social Science Studies), where he founded the CADIS (Centre for Sociological Analysis and Intervention).
Alain Touraine is a member of a number of sociology associations; notably, he has been President of the French Sociological Society, from 1968 to 1970, and Vice-President of the International Sociological Association, from 1974 to 1978. He has also been a member of the High Council for Integration (1994-96) and a board member at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine. He is a foreign member of numerous academies including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europea, the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
Touraine’s work can be divided into three stages: the first which focused on the study of work and workers’ awareness, based on fieldwork carried out in Latin America; the second looking at social movements, and the uprisings of May 1968 and the coups in Latin American states; and the third, which is ongoing, studying the role of the subject in social movements.
Debates on Education:
Presentation
