“Liberal education” in the globalizing modernity in the perspective of sustainable development: the experience of philosophical interpretation

Abstract

Discussion between defenders of preservation of elements of “liberal education” and those who consider it “remnants” (V. Pareto) of the “outdated” model of the “classical university” unfolds in the horizon of the “liberal consensus” regarding the “values” and “goals” of university education in the globalizing reality presented in the economic paradigm (J. Agamben). The prospect of preserving the liberal democratic tradition and the formation of civic “skills of democracy” translates the discussion into a plan of interpreting the meaning of these values and determining the conditions for ensuring their validity. A philosophical interpretation of the essence of liberal values in the context of the foundations of the economic paradigm, which presupposes external criticism, allows us to assert: the distinction between “free” and “professional” education, which is valid for the “university of reason” and has limited significance for the concept of liberal education, is removed in the modern model of the universitycorporation as an enterprise for the production of human capital and practically oriented knowledge/learning aimed at fulfilling the request market for a specialist who has mastered a variety of competencies. The concept of “sustainable development”, the constitutive of which in recent years has become the discourse of security, determines a specific explanation of “politicization” (W. Beck), one of which is the defense of “free education”, a palliative that corrects the universal and total “monocausal logic of capital” as a real beginning (in the meaning of “ἀρχή”) of global modernity presented in the liberal version of the economic paradigm.