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
Liquid-modern culture, unlike the culture of the nation-building era, has no 'people' to 'cultivate'. It has instead clients to seduce. And unlike its 'solid modern' predecessor, it no longer wishes to work itself, eventually but the sooner the better, out of a job. Its job is now to render its own survival permanent - through temporalizing all aspects of life of its former wards, now reborn as its clients.
The population of almost every country is nowadays a collection of diasporas. The population of almost every sizeable city is nowadays an aggregate of ethnic, religious, lifestyle enclaves in which the line dividing 'insiders' and 'outsiders' is a hotly contested issue.
Thus, generational change has been transformed. Children as a rule enter a world drastically different from the one which their parents were trained and learned to take as a standard of 'normality'.
Keywordsdiasporas, city, generation, migrations, internet, education
Zygmunt Bauman is, without doubt, one of the European thinkers producing the most extensive and original work.
He was born in 1925 in Poznan, Poland. He taught sociology at the University of Warsaw between 1954 and 1968, when, as part of an anti-Semitic purge, he lost his place as a professor and emigrated to Israel. He has lived in England since 1971, where he was professor at the University of Leeds until he retired in 1990.
His work focuses on subjects such as social classes, socialism, the move from modernity to post-modernity, globalization and the new poor.
He invented concepts such as "liquid modernity" or "liquid love" which refer to the evaporation of traditional links and have become part of the common cultural language of the 21st century.
Amongst his recent works, the following stand out: "Educational Challenges of the Liquid Modern-Era", and "Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty".
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