Education in the World of Diasporas

Abstract

Today's culture consists of offerings, not norms. Liquid-modern culture, unlike the culture of the nation-building era, has no ‘people’ to ‘cultivate’. The solid-modern policy of dealing with difference, the policy of assimilation to the dominant culture and stripping the strangers of their strangehood, is no longer feasible. For the young, the main attraction of the virtual world derives from the absence of contradictions and cross-purposes that haunt the off-line life. Unlike its off-line alternative, the online world renders the infinite multiplication of contacts conceivable – both plausible and feasible. It does it through the weakening of bonds – in a stark opposition to its off-line counterpart, known to find its bearings in the continuous effort to strengthen the bonds by severely limiting the number of contacts while deepening each one of them. It is the quantity of connections rather than their quality that makes the difference between chances of success or failure. A crisis, however, may linger just after the next corner. So it is too early to decide how the ingrained world-views and attitudes of the present-day young will eventually fit the world to come.