지식혁명의 포스트모던 조건과 평생학습의 난제

Abstract

오늘날 지식혁명과 평생학습의 관계를 논하는 대부분의 논점들은 대부분 지식의 양적 생산 확대와 그 의미하는 것이며, 기존의 학교교육만으로는 이러한 요구를 만족시킬 수 없기 때문에 변화된 지식생산과 유통방식의 변화에 대처하기 위해 보다 많은 지식을 보다 유연하게 공급할 수 있는 평생학습이라는 수단이 필요하다고 주장한다. 그러나 보다 핵심적인 논의의 지점은 지식의 존재조건 자체에 중대한 변화가 있었으며, 또한 그러한 지식을 생산하고 관리하고 학습하는 양식(mode) 자체가 달라져야 한다는 것에서 찾아져야 한다. 다시 말해서, 지식이란 무엇이며, 어떻게 사회적으로 생산되고 관리될 수 있는 것인가에 대한 대답방식이 총체적으로 변화하고 있다는 점을 면밀히 검토하는 것이다. 이 논문은 이 문제에 대한 해답을 시도한다. 이에 근거하여 필자는 새로운 형태의 평생교육이론과 연구를 구성하는 데에 있어서 필수적으로 요구되는 쟁점들을 차례로 검토하였다.

Recently most of the discussions about the relationship between the emergence of knowledge revolution and the need of lifelong learning system are based on the relationship of the technical rationality, in which the requirement of 'more knowledge' asks for 'more expanded social learning device', called lifelong learning system. In this article, I strongly argue that the rationality is not only superficial but also fails to take the deep level of connections between the two phenomena into consideration. The article is written to argue that the nature of knowledge revolution has to be understood from the respect of the change of the conditions of knowledge, instead of its quantitative explosion, and lifelong learning system evolved to meet the new conditions of knowledge existence, as a new social management system of learning in general. According to the main issue, I explored additional considerations to be taken into account related to construct new appropriate mode of scholastic discourse of lifelong education theory and research building, as follows: First, lifelong learning has to be understood as a 'expanded' mode of social management system of learning, replacing the traditional 'restricted' mode concentrated mostly on schooling. Second, lifelong learning discourse, including the concepts and epistemology, and methodological approaches, are fundamentally based on the emergence of postmodern condition of knowledge and the way in which social learning system deals with it. Third, modern schooling was bound up with the 'double-binding' between the Subject and the Discipline, both of which are intertwined and define one and another. It naturally created and legitimated technical rationality by which social power structure easily intervened into the educational system and imposed the ascribed social reproduction system. Postmodern lifelong learning discourse penetrates the contradiction and tries to de-construct the self-binding confinement of learning subject in decision-making process. Fourth, while technical rationality is the key constraint that determined the way of learning in modern schooling, postmodern lifelong learning abandons the foundationalism in epistemology that has been given by the technical rationality imposed by the modernity itself. Fifth, in consideration with the boundaries of knowledge as the source of power distribution and social control, postmodern lifelong learning has to de-defferentiate the existing knowledge structure in educational theories and action. Apart from the extrinsic boundaries, it has to seek a way in which education research can create its own self-regulatory boundaries derived from the dynamics of co-evolution between the self-organization of social knowledge and the attached learning process.