L’educazione nel tempo della post-verità. Pedagogia e mass- media

By focusing on a pedagogical approach, the article aims to reflect upon the role and attitude that education and school take or should take within the context of cultural and media changes taking place in contemporary society. In an era in which fiction and reality are interwoven, and so-called post-truth is dominating the ways people communicate, inform each other, and argue, semiotics of education becomes an essential tool to redefine the framework of paideia. This semiotics contributes to understanding paideia as a continuous process of taking shape and transforming the individual qualitatively. It is invoked as a remedy for various disorientations influencing individuals’ lives and the future of whole communities. Responsibility, critical thinking, and solid interpretation skills are all means required to solve the problem of lack of clarity, unreliability and individualistic relativism in contemporary communication at a narrative level. Education is once again, along with educational agencies (mainly the school), called into question. The role of these agencies concerns their function of leading institutions aimed at traditionally providing the theoretical framework and managing the educational processes. This article is based on the conviction that any educational process should be centered on a cultural and intellectual dimension. Also, this process should take shape from the aims of a pedagogy and education that, far from being reduced to a mere technical practice within the context of a didactics influenced by the trends of our times, can retrieve a specific narrative. This narrative should be centered on the promotion of intellectual tools and mental habits capable of preparing young people to live their own time, to know how to discern, choose and act with a view to their full human fulfillment.