Transdisciplinary Education as Ethic of the Diversity Reform in the World-Society of the 21st Century
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Sağlık! The mission of Global Education Magazine is to propose a moral agreement between all interested people to reflect on a new perspective for the future of humanity. If we look ahead to the future, the 21st century education should promote the transformation of planetary culture through the consciousness of human beings. This new vision of reality has to be holistic, polilogic and transdimensional: understanding the human being as an integral part of the cosmos as a whole.
In this sense, transdisciplinarity represents the capable germ to promote an endogenous development of the evolutionary spirit of internal critical consciousness, where religion and science are complementary. Respect, solidarity and cooperation should be global standards for the entire human development with no boundaries. This requires a radical change in the ontological models of sustainable development, global education and world-society. We must rely on the recognition of a plurality of models, cultures and socio-economical diversification. As well as biodiversity is the way for the emergence of new species, cultural diversity represents the creative potential of world-society.
The 21st century demands a complete change in our attitude facing life and the socio-intellectual organization of the educational system. The future global education should be concerned by multidimensional development of the intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual aspects of human beings, in order to live in harmony and happiness, as part of the whole. To achieve this, we need to create a new ethic of diversity, based on the ecology of consciousness, which evolutionary spirit derives in taking individual responsibility and the transformation of the present through cooperative action.
Metaphorically, our consciences have to flourish with the same care as a bonsai, whose flower symbolizes the beauty of diversity and, its rich ramifications the different ethno-cultural societies. The root would be, naturally, transdisciplinarity, because in it lies in the recognition of all regions of the world and different cultural traditions. We are here to advice reciprocally: planting seeds of love and justice. We must build spiritual and scientific bridges interconnecting nations and people from all over the world, without giving special privileges to any cultural space or time that judge or hierarchizes the coexistence in the common habitat of Mother Earth.
The challenge of contemporary’s world complexity is the key problem of thought and political action. In all cultures and in all times, knowledge is subordinate to natural, social and cultural context. The knowledge acquisition process is a dialectical relationship between knowing and doing, caused by the same consciousness of the individual. In this way, the past and future are our present in the process of spiritual and scientific quest, because they are complementary inquiries of reality that make up an indivisible whole between consciousness and matter. Knowledge means, thus, the acquired ability to survive and transcend from the major beliefs and traditions, as well as, recent findings of science.
For this reason, the world-society of 21st century must integrate, into their individual consciences, new radical epistemological postulates to understand, address and reflect about the new challenges derivate from globalization. An historically unprecedented situation that requires comtemplate, in an integrated mode, a transdisciplinary knowledge about cognition, history, politics, physics, biology, computer science, etc..
It is also necessary to understand human reality with the understanding of others: between people, between countries and between ethnic groups. The 21st century education must be characterized by constant change, because diversity’s development should not be treated as a finished result, but as an emergent process in transpolitical and transcultural construction, whose knowledge is oxygenated through intergenerational solidarity. Consequently, appreciated readers, tell me, would it be a Utopia to dream with a flourishing consciousness that embody the ethic of diversity as the major multidimensional key to end up with the current situation of refugees around the world?
Javier Collado Ruano
Director of Edition
This article was published on June 20th: World Refugee Day in Global Education Magazine.
