UNIVERSITY OF CASTILLA-LA MANCHA

Albacete’s Faculty of Education

Subject: Contemporary trends in education
Teacher: Antonio Cebrián Martínez
Academic year: 2017-2018

Edgar Morin’s Book:

“Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future”

Students:
Eva Álvarez Lorente
José Francisco Campos Martínez
Antonio Morcillo Martínez
Javier Ruiz Izquierdo
Master degree in Primary Education
2nd course group B
Date of submission: 04/05/2018
 CONTENTS
1. Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future
a

1.1 Blindness of Knowledge: error and illusion.

1.2 The principles of a relevant knowledge.
1.3 Teaching the human condition.
1.4 Teaching the earthly identity.
1.5 Confront uncertainties.
1.6 Teaching comprehension.
1.7 The ethics of humankind.

2. Questions

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1. SEVEN COMPLEX LESSONS IN EDUCATION FOR THE FUTURE
1.1 Blindness of knowledge: error and illusion
Edgar Morin, establishes the need to implement and develop in the educational system
the study of the cerebral, mental and cultural characteristics of human knowledge, as
well as its processes and learning modalities and the physical, psychic and cultural
factors that put it at risk.
He considers that we educate notoriously "communicating" knowledge, without
knowing the students properly and without considering their capacities, abilities and
difficulties, and with a total incompetence to understand their propensity to both error
and illusion.
a

It also argues that knowledge cannot be considered as a tool that can be used without
examining its nature, knowledge of knowledge must be a primary need to prepare the
student to face the risks of error and illusion, that is, to obtain and acquire an effective,
lucid and lifelong learning.
a

Therefore, education must be centred to the identification of the origins of errors,

illusions and blindness.

 The Achilles heel of knowledge:

- Mental errors: memory, source of truth, may be subject to errors and illusions, this is
because our mind unconsciously tends to select the memories that suit us and reject,
even delete those that are unfavourable, and sometimes we even tend to deform
memories by projections or confusions of having lived them.
- Intellectual errors: it is part of the organizing logic of our systems of ideas, the fact
of resisting information that does not fit or cannot be integrated.
- The errors of reason: like our memory, our systems of ideas also protect us from the
errors and illusions that are inscribed in them, being rationality the one that corrects
them and makes us act and think in a logical way.
- Paradigmatic blindness: in education you can define a paradigm as the promotion of
the concepts of intelligibility, where individuals know, think and act according to the
paradigms culturally inscribed among them.

 The imprinting:
Determinism of convictions and beliefs, imposed by the force in an imperative,
normalizing and prohibitive way that marks humans from birth. Thus, the imperative
and prohibitive power of paradigms determines stereotypes, received ideas, stupid
beliefs, etc.

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  Noology: possession.
Beliefs and ideas are not only products of the mind, they are also mental beings that
have life and power; in this way they can possess us. Therefore the noosphere is in us
and us in it from our birth. On the one hand, societies domesticate individuals by myths
and ideas, but in turn individuals can domesticate the society that controls them as well
as control for themselves their own ideas.

 The unexpected:
We are too accustomed and safe in our own theories and ideas, but these are extremely
resistant and not resilient to changes and do not have enough structure to accommodate
the new.

 The uncertainty of knowledge:

Makes us to see the need for any education to clear the big questions about our ability to
know, for this we need to make our theories more rational, critical, reflective, self-
critical and allowing complex knowledge.

1.2 The Principles of a relevant knowledge

The world in which we live is constituted by a series of random and difficult key
information, by key problems, by the context of political, economic, anthropological,
ecological knowledge ... What is that? to gain access to information about the world and
how to achieve the possibility of articulating and organizing it? How to perceive and
conceive the context, the global (the relation all / parts), the multidimensional, the
complex...? But what I should do is know that it is such a thing to achieve it.
- Context: it is the location of the information and elements so that the information
acquires its meaning.
- The global: refers to the set that contains the various parts of the information linked in
an inter-retroactive way to make sense of it.
- The multidimensional: complex units in which we can group information such as, for
example, the human being or society itself.
- The complex: refers to an inseparable information that is interdependent and
interactive between the object and the context.
In addition, another fundamental principle for the pertinent knowledge is the general
intelligence that is diffused as the development of general aptitudes of the mind that
allows a better development of the particular or specialized competences. In this way,
we can face everyday problems in a more powerful and effective way. On the other
hand, it is responsible for operating and organizing the mobilization of knowledge of all
cases in particular.

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For this, general intelligence works together with the context, with the complex, with
the global and with the multidimensional in order to promote this intelligence in
individuals to overcome the antonyms and the use of existing content. It is important to
emphasize also the problems that may appear in the relationship with the relevant
knowledge.
1. Disjunction and closed specialization.
2. Reduction and disjunction (reduce the complex to the simple).
3. False rationality (impoverishment of enrichment to traces of superstitions and fears of
the population).

1.3 Teach the human condition

The education of the future should be a primary and universal education focused on the
human condition, instead, place them in the universe and separate it from it, to do so,
question our situation in the world, assess the influence of knowledge and understand
the concomitant advances that inhabit our day to day.
Therefore, we must highlight the natural sciences in education for the future in order to
locate the human condition in the world and to integrate the contribution of the
humanities (literature, poetry, arts...). At the same time, we must study the human
rootedness and uprooting related to the cosmic condition, the physical condition, the
terrestrial condition and the human condition.
But not only this, but within the study of the human being must study several loops that
play a fundamental role in human development and that condition us each in the
dimension that affects.
1. Brain loop  mind  culture.
2. Loop for reason  affect  impulse.
3. Individual loop  society  species.
The human being can be understood with a unity, but also as a diverse element, that is
why the education of the future must be the idea of the unity of the human race does not
erase the one of its diversity, and the diversity does not erase the one of unit. There is a
human unity. There is a human diversity. The unit is not alone in the biological features
of the oven sapiens species. Diversity is not only in the psychological, cultural and
social features of the human being. There is also a biological diversity within the human
unit; not only is there a cerebral unit but mental, psychic, affective and intellectual. All
these are the parties in the individual, social and cultural and plural field of individuals.

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Sapiens  demens
In the 21st century we should abandon the unilateral vision of human beings defined by
rationality technology utilitarian activities compulsory necessities.
The man of rationality is also a man of emotion, myth, and dementia. The man of work
is also the man of play. Empirical man is also imaginative man. Economical man is also
a man of “consumption”. Man who is prosaic is also poetic, meaning a man of fervor,
involvement, love, ecstasy. Everywhere men are engaged in intellectual, practical,
technical activity that testifies to an empirico-rational intelligence; and everywhere
festivals, ceremonies, cults and states of possession, exaltation, waste, “consumption,”
testify to homo ludens, poeticus, consumans, imaginarius, demeans. Games, festivals,
ritual activities are not leisure activities that get us back in shape for practical or
working life. Beliefs in gods and ideas cannot be reduced to illusions or superstition,
they are rooted deeply in anthropological depths, and they touch the human being to the
quick of his nature.

Homo complexus
We are infantile, neurotic, frenzied beings and yet we are rational. That is truly the stuff
that human beings are made of. A human being is a reasonable unreasonable being who
can be subdued and excessive. Subject to intense unstable affectivity, he smiles, laughs,
and cries but is also able to understand objectively. He is serious and calculating but
also nervous, anguished, playful, excited, ecstatic; he is a being of violence and
tenderness, love and hate; a being invaded by the imaginary who can recognize the real,
knows death and cannot believe it, spawns myth and magic but also science and
philosophy.
Madness is not only a downfall or illness, it is a central problem for man, and madness
has not brought the human species to extinction. And yet it seems that so much time has
been wasted in rites, cults, intoxications, decorations, dances, and countless illusions...
Despite all this lost time, technological and then scientific development has been
fantastic: civilizations produced philosophy and science, Humanity dominated the
Earth. Education should show and illustrate the multiple facets of human Fate: fate of
the human species, individual fate, social fate, historical 28 fate, and all these fates
mixed together and inseparable. One of the essential vocations of the education of the
future will be the investigation and study of human complexity. It will lead to
knowledge that will give awareness of the common condition of all human beings.

1.4 Teaching the earthly identity

We entered the planetary era in the 16th century; at the end of the 20th century we have
reached the stage of globalization. Globalization as the present state of the planetary era
means, in the first place, as the geographer Jacques Levy so well expressed it, “the
emergence of a new object, the world as such.” In these times of telecommunications,
computers, Internet, we are submerged by the world’s complexity and bombarded with
countless bits of information about the world that drown out the possibilities of
intelligibility.

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We must hereafter conceive the unbearable complexity of the world, meaning we must
simultaneously consider the unity and diversity, the complementarities and antagonisms
of the planetary process. The planet is not a global system it is a moving whirlwind with
no organizing center. Our planet requires polycentric thought that can aim at a
universalism that is not abstract but conscious of the unity/diversity of the human
condition; a polycentric thought nourished by the cultures of the world. Educating for
this thought is the finality of education of the future, which in the planetary era should
work for an earth identity and conscience.

The Planetary Era

Human history began with a planetary diaspora across all the continents and in modern
times entered the planetary era of communication between fragments of the human
diaspora. The diaspora of humanity did not produce a genetic split: pygmies, blacks,
yellows, reds, whites all share the same basic human properties and belong to the same
species. But the diaspora did produce an extraordinary diversity of languages, cultures,
and experience, which is a source of innovation and creation in all realms. The treasure
of humanity lies in its creative diversity, but the source of this creativity is its generative
unity.
In 1492, young nations set out to conquer the Globe, and their adventures of war and
death brought the five continents into communication and opened the planetary era, for
better and for worse. The planetary era opened and proceeded with violence,
destruction, slavery, shameful exploitation of Africa and the Americas.
Planetarization developed with contributions from European civilization on those
continents; arms, techniques, and concepts reached trading posts, outposts, enclaves. 21
million Europeans crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. Similar migrations took place
in Asia, where Indians settled in East Africa and the Natal and Chinese merchants
fanned out in Siam, Java, the Malay Peninsula, California, British Columbia, New
South Wales, and Polynesia.
Globalization is obvious, subconscious, and omnipresent. Globalization is undeniably
unifying. But we must say in the next breath that it is conflictual. Globalizing
unification increasingly provokes a counter-effect-Balkanization-its own negative. The
world is more and more one and ever more divided. Paradoxically, the planetary era
itself encouraged and facilitated a generalized breakup into nation-states. In fact,
emancipating demands of nationhood are stimulated by a movement of return to
ancestral identity in reaction against the planetary current of civilizational
homogenization, and these demands are intensified by the generalized crisis of the
future. In the 20th century, a unique planetary tissue was simultaneously formed and
torn apart; the irritated isolated fragments fight each other. Nations dominate the world
scene, acting like brutal drunken titans, powerful and powerless. And a techno-
industrial wave sweeps over the Globe, washing away so many cultural, ethnic, human
diversities. Development itself has caused more problems than it solved, and has left
prosperous Western societies in a deep crisis of civilization.

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The 20th Century legacy
The 20th century was marked by the alliance of two barbarous systems. The first rises
up from the depths of time, bringing fanaticism, war, deportation, massacres. The
second, cold, faceless, and obsessively calculating, comes from a rationalization that
neglects individuals, their bodies and souls and feelings, and churns up the techno-
industrial forces of servitude and death. To get beyond this barbarian age we must first
recognize its legacy. A double heritage of death and birth.
It would seem that the 20th century confirms the dire saying that human evolution is
growth of the power of death. The death introduced by the 20th century is more and
worse than just the death of tens of millions killed in two world wars and in Nazi and
Soviet extermination camps. It is the age of two new death forces.

Nuclear weapons
The first death force is the potential global death of all humanity by nuclear weapons.
This danger is still not dissipated as we enter the third millennium. On the contrary, it
has increased with the proliferation and miniaturization of the bomb. Hereafter, the
potential for self-annihilation walks side by side with humanity.

New perils
The second death force is potential ecological death. Since the 70s we have realized
that waste, emanations, and exhalations from our urban techno-industrial development
degrade the biosphere and threaten our living environment with irremediable poisoning.
The frantic domination of Nature by technology is suicidal for humanity. Elsewhere,
deathly forces that we thought we had eradicated are rebelling, the AIDS virus stalks us,
other terrible new viruses and bacteria that were tamed or almost eliminated strike back
in new antibioticresistant strains. The menace of death hangs over us in thermonuclear
weapons, wraps us in a degraded biosphere, lurks in the heart of our intimate contacts,
and crouches in our souls with the deathly appeal of drugs.

Death of modernity
The civilization created in the West cast off its moorings and headed for what was
thought to be infinite progress. It advanced with concomitant developments in science,
reason, history, economy, 35 democracy. But we learned, with Hiroshima, that science
is ambivalent; we saw reason regress and Stalinist madness masked in historical reason;
we have recognized that there are no laws of History leading us ineluctably to a radiant
future; we realize that the triumph of democracy was nowhere permanently ensured; we
have seen that industrial development can entail cultural ravages and deathly pollution;
we have seen that the civilization of well-being can at the same time produce illbeing. If
modernity is defined as unconditional faith in progress, technology, science, and
economic development, then that modernity is dead.

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Hope
Because the brain +’ mind dialogic of humankind is not closed, because it carries the
necessary resources for creation, we can glimpse the potential of a new creation-earth
citizenship-in the third millennium, born of seeds and embryos contributed by the 20th
century. And education, which both transmits the old, and opens the mind to the new, is
at the heart of this new mission.

Contribution of countercurrents
The 20th century belatedly bequeathed regenerative countercurrents. Countercurrents
have often developed in reaction to dominant currents and changed the course of events.
The following are noteworthy: The ecological countercurrent, which will inevitably
gather force in reaction to the increase in environmental damage and
technological/industrial catastrophes. l The qualitative countercurrent is a reaction
against the predominance of the quantitative and the general tendency to uniformity; it
values quality in all realms, beginning with the quality of life. The countercurrent of
resistance against strictly utilitarian prosaic life is demonstrated by a search for a poetic
life devoted to love, delight, passion, festivity. The countercurrent of resistance against
the dictates of standardized consumption operates in two contrasting ways: a search for
intense experience (the consummate), or a discipline of temperance and frugality. An as
yet timid countercurrent of emancipation from the omnipresent tyranny of money is
expressed by efforts to resist the reign of profit and counterbalance it with human
solidarity. l Another timid countercurrent in reaction against unleashed violence is
sustained by an ethics of pacification of minds and souls.

Contradictory game of possibles

One of the fundamental conditions for positive evolution is for the liberating forces
inherent in science and technology to surmount the forces of death and servitude.
Biotechnological development is another prodigious source of the best and the worst
possibilities. Genetics and molecular manipulations of the human brain will open the
way to normalization and standardization of the human species beyond anything ever
accomplished by indoctrination and propaganda. But they will also help eliminate
handicapping defects, promote the practice of predictive medicine, and give the mind
control of its brain. The spiritual, cultural, sociologic and anthropologic potential for
progress restores the principle of hope, but without “scientific” certainty or “historical”
promise. It is an uncertain potential heavily dependent on awareness, determination,
courage, luck... Awareness has become urgent and primordial. The worst dangers and
the greatest hopes are borne by the same function: the human mind itself. And this is
why the reform of thought has become a vital necessity.

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Earth Identity, Earth Awareness
The minimal rational demand of a shrunken interdependent world is planetary union.
This union requires an awareness and feeling of mutual belonging that connects us to
our Earth, considered as the first and ultimate Homeland. If the notion of homeland
bears a common identity, a relation of affective filiation to a substance that is both
maternal and paternal (in the feminine-masculine French word “patrie”) and a common
fate, then the notion of Earth-Homeland can be proposed. We have to inscribe in
ourselves: an anthropological conscience that recognizes our unity in diversity. + An
ecological conscience, aware that we inhabit, with all mortal beings, the same living
sphere (biosphere). Recognizing our consubstantial bond with the biosphere we can
give up the Promethean dream of dominating the universe and nurture our aspiration for
conviviality on this earth. + An earthling civic conscience, a feeling of solidarity with
the children of the Earth and responsibility for them. + A spiritual conscience of the
human condition, acquired through the exercise of complex thought that opens us to
inter-criticism, selfcriticism, and inter-understanding.
Connectedness [reliance] should replace disjunction and bring about ‘symbiosophy,”
the wisdom of living together. The anthropological double imperative imposes: save
human unity and save human diversity. Develop our identities which are both
concentric and plural; our ethnic, homeland, community of civilizatior identity, and our
citizens of the earth identity. On the level of planetary humanity we are engaged in the
essentia task of life which is to resist death. Today, the fundamental globa objective of
all education aspiring not only to progress but to the surviva of humanity is to Civilize
and Unify the Earth and Transform the human species into genuine humanity.
Awareness of our humanity in this planetary era should lead us to a new unity and
reciprocal commiseration from each to each, from all to all. The education of the future
should teach an ethics of planetary understanding.

1.5 To Face Uncertainties

'The gods give us many surprises; what is expected is not fulfilled and for the
unexpected a God opens the door '. Euripides.
Previous centuries always believed in a progressive or repeated future, while in the 20th
century has discovered the loss of the future, that is, its unpredictability.

1.5.1 THE HISTORICAL UNCERTAINTY

Questions like: 'Who would have thought in 1930 that Hitler would come legally to
power in 1933?'
'The future is now questioned and it will be forever' (Patocka), that is, the future is
called uncertainty.

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1.5.2 THE CREATORY AND DESTRUCTIVE HISTORY
The emergence of the new cannot be predicted, but it would not be new. The
transformation starts from creations that develop into an increasingly powerful trend
that produces a new normality. But there are also the destructions that cause new
developments.

1.5.3 AN UNCERTAIN WORLD

We must replace the universe’s vision with an impeccable order by a vision where the
universe is the game and what is at stake in a dialogic between order, disorder and
organization.

1.5.4 TO FACE UNCERTAINTIES

We must learn to face the uncertainty since we live in a changing era where values are
ambivalent, where everything is binding. There are different types of uncertainties:
- The uncertainty of the real
- The uncertainty of knowledge
- The uncertainties and the ecology of the action
1.5.5 THE LONG-TERM PREDICTABILITY
The effects of a short-term action can be calculated, but in the long term they are
unpredictable. In this way, no action is guaranteed to act in the direction of its intention.

1.6 To teach comprehension

The incomprehension is still general. Undoubtedly, there are great and multiple
advances in compression, but the progress of incomprehension seems even greater.
The problem of compression is doubly polarized:
- A planetary pole: compression between humans.
- An individual pole: particular relationships between family members.

1.6.1 TWO COMPREHENSIONS

Communication does not involve understanding, but intelligibility.
There are two understandings:
- Intellectual or objective understanding
- Intersubjective human understanding

1.6.2 AN EDUCATION FOR OBSTACLES TO COMPREHENSION

Understanding the meaning of another's words or ideas is always threatened on all sides:
- There is 'noise' that creates misunderstandings.
- There is polysemy of a notion that is understood in another way.

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- There is ignorance of the rites and customs of the other.
- There is incomprehension of the values of another culture.
- There is incomprehension of the ethical imperatives of a culture.
- There is the impossibility of understanding another philosophy.
- There is the impossibility of understanding one mental structure to another.

All this is determined by:

- Self-centeredness, related to self-deception
- Ethnocentrism and sociocentrism, which nourish racism and make the foreigner
lose his human qualities.
- The reducing spirit, reducing the knowledge of the complex to one of its
elements, considered as the most significant.

1.6.3 THE ETHICS OF COMPREHENSION

The ethics of understanding is an art of living that asks us to understand in a
disinterested way and incomprehension.
What favours understanding is:
- The 'good to think'.
- Introspection (permanent self-examination).

1.6.4 THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMAN COMPLEXITY

Understanding others requires an awareness of human complexity. This is determined
by:
- The subjective openness towards others.
- The internalization of tolerance.

1.6.5 PLANETARY UNDERSTANDING, ETHICS AND CULTURE

We must link the ethics of understanding between people with the ethics of the
planetary era that never ceases to globalize understanding. Cultures must learn from
each other.
Understanding is both a means and an end to human communication. The planet needs
mutual understanding in every way. Given the importance of education in
understanding at all educational levels and at all ages, the development of understanding
requires a planetary reform of mentalities; that must be the work of education of the
future.

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1.7 The ethics of the humankind
In the past, ethics was understood as the study of morality, and we understood that as
individuals we coexists in a society. Now ethics is analysed from the point of view of
the individual that is related to space, where mutual control of society by the individual
and the individual by society, what is known as democracy, is required. The author
considers that teaching at this point should lead to an "anthropoetic" looking at the
trilogy of the human condition and that it consists of being at the same time individual-
society-species, implying the inclusion of terrestrial citizenship.
Ethics must be formed in minds based on the awareness that the human being is at the
same time an individual, that he is part of a society and that he is another species in the
terrestrial world. The properly human ethic is to maintain that loop, from which our
conscience and our human spirit arise.

 Individual-society loop: teaching democracy

Democracy allows the rich and complex relationship of the individual-society, where
they can help each other, develop, regulate and control each other. In this sense,
democracy:
- It supposes and feeds the diversity of interest as well as the diversity of ideas,
establishing dialogue as a fundamental tool.
- It must include the right of minorities. Just as we must protect the diversity of species
to save the biosphere, we must protect ideas and opinions to save democratic life.
- It is based on the ideal Freedom - Equality - Fraternity.
 The individual - species loop: teaching terrestrial citizenship
The ethical link of the individual with the human being is known from the oldest
civilizations, since humanity as a planetary destination allows us to assume and fulfill
this part of the anthropo-ethics that concerns the relationship between the singular
individual and the human species as a whole.

 Humanity as a planetary destiny

a

In this review of democracy and the acquisition of global and complex knowledge, is
where education (not only the school, but also other areas of formal and even non-
formal education) should play a priority role, teaching participation of individuals and
societies in such a way that a "Humanity with a common conscience and planetary
solidarity of the humankind is born”, and democracy thus becomes a true participatory
reality.

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2. QUESTIONS
TRUE/FALSE:
1. According to the book “Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future”,
democracy limits and restricts the diversity of interest and ideas, not taking into
consideration the rights of minorities. FALSE
2. According to the book “Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future”, the
context refers to an inseparable information that is all that is interdependent and
interactive between the object and the complex. FALSE
3. According to the book ‘Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future”,
globalizing unification increasingly provokes a counter-effect-Balkanization-its own
negative. TRUE
4. According to the book ‘Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future”: 'The
future is not now questioned and it will not be forever'. FALSE
MULTIPLE CHOICE:

1. According to the book “Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future”, the
fact of resisting information that does not fit or cannot be integrated in our mind is a/an
______________ error.
a) Reasoning
b) Mental
c) Intellectual
d) None of them are correct

2. According to the book “Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future”, which
of the following is not one of the main loops that affect humans:
a) Brain loop  mind  culture.
b) Loop for reason  affect  impulse.
c) Individual loop  society  species.
d) All of them are correct.

3. According to the book “Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future”,
anthropological double imperative imposes:
a) Saving human unity
b) Saving human diversity
c) All of them are correct
d) None of them is correct

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4. According to the book ‘Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, the
existing uncertainty is…
a) The uncertainty of the real
b) The uncertainty of knowledge
c) The uncertainties and the ecology of the action
d) All of them are correct

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