Rethinking Education from the Perspective of Life

In recent years the problematic controversies inherent in the relationship between science and the sacred, religion and modernity, have intensified. Such dichotomies reappear in the psychocognitive fields under the rubric of doctrinal content and scientific theories in the field of education. This querelle is especially evident in the field of education between supporters of evolutionism and creationism, or in its most recent formulation, so-called intelligent design (ID1). This clash, particularly evident in the United States, was ignited in Italy in the spring of 2004 following the concerted attempts of the Minister of Public Education to exclude evolutionary theory from the scuola media (secondary school) curriculum. These developments are of particular interest when seen in the light of recent, sometimes tragic, events in the West, increasingly taken as it is with international crises (war, poverty, accentuation of political, economic, and ecological imbalances with regard to Africa, Latin America, etc.) and problems connected with the process of globalization, all of which are present in Europe, not least in Italy, where they underline and give impetus to the need for political and social integration. The present work analyzes the implications of affirming the evolutionary paradigm in the philosophical and educational fields. Every cultural factor expresses itself in a metaphysical frame, in a sociocognitive scenario. The personal and social expectations of the medium unconsciously form the morphology of the psychocognitive and cultural landscape. This stage determines a pool of socially determined and shared goals and values that we will indicate by the term quality. It is in terms of this that the subject models its social location, develops its cognitive perspective, and defines its own philosophical ethical ideals; in short, it constructs its Ego Ideal. Previously,2 we proposed a formal classification of theological and cosmological models that delineates a clear theoretical division of possible models of the sacred.3 That work, corroborated by numerous anthropological and philosophical data, classifies the system under two headings: religions and “theoethotomies” (a neologism).4 The religious model, due to intrinsic and exclusive formulas, lends itself to being compatible with the present evolutionary paradigm: In particular, this results in the psychocognitive basis on which the structure of the Ego Ideal typical of such systems is founded. Currently, the various religions are placed on the formal and anthropological levels in a univocal orientation: The present systems, apart from the doctrinal aspects, are part of an evolutionary paradigm in which they assume a philosophicotheological perspective as an instance of natural philosophy, in which are found conceptions of natural reality, human nature, for example, and which aim to define ethical principles, universal values of man, and so on. It is interesting to note how modern concerns are bound up with substantially different anthropological and cosmological conceptions than those of evolutionary paradigms. This has caused the querelle since the time of Darwin, which has led to one evident contrast between evolution and religion tout court: a misleading philosophical excess. In particular, the evolutionary paradigm 1. It affirms a conception of biology intrinsically incompatible with the fixed canonical conception of centuries past and the impossibility of affirming an ontological distinction in the origin and nature of man. 2. It is incompatible with the classic telenomic hypothesis of the emergence of living species, in particular, the phyletic positioning and ontological role of man in that natural world. 3. It supports an implicit indeterministic meaning—congruent with other scientific theories—characteristic of natural dynamics (in particular biological). 4. In relation to the mind/body problem, evolutionary biology expresses a monistic meaning antithetical to every animistic and pneumatic dualism of man. None of these affirmations expressed ab origine any theoretical opposition to theism; in contrast to theoethotomistic models, the religious models show a natural predisposition to incorporate the evolutionary paradigm. This because they avoid formal difficulties revealed in theoethotomistic conceptions; these difficulties are in contradiction to the evolutionary conception as testified by the continuous and uncertain attempt to synthesize evolutionary concepts and Catholic doctrine.