Groping towards a New Future: Education for Paradigm Change

Abstract

We live in an era, very likely already at an end, in which our basic assumptions about change are evolutionary and optimistic: our horizon of expectation is that standards of material comfort and quality of life are going lo improve for ourselves and for our children. When, as is currently the case, many face a decline in income and opportunity, there seems a generalised instinct to treat this as temporary and a presumption that things are going to return to a state of continuing improvement before too long. Indeed, many of the fundamental disagreements in public debate about today’s crisis relate to how soon this is likely lo happen and what means are most likely to bring it about. Development discourse, whether it relates to development theory and practice or to development education, is particularly prone to these evolutionary and optimistic assumptions, reflecting the optimism of the post-war era in which the development project was born.

We are experiencing now I believe an intellectual crisis that is far more serious than the economic one which fills the papers, dominates the programmes in our media. Such a crisis has arisen before at times of grave crisis or impending change and it has drawn a response from intellectuals as they were forced to react to the collapse of the prevailing assumptions and they engaged with the need for a new paradigm of life and politics.

(Michael D., lliggins, President of Ireland, in a leclure in the London School of Economics, 21^s! February 2012)