Theory as a form of action combines with the work of disinterested reflection to put comprehensive worldviews into force within a culture. Here is the cultural crucible from which a people cast their standards of knowing, their distinctive values, and their prized skills. Here educators work as public intellectuals, addressing basic beliefs, creating a resonant aspiration through the polity. Hence the question for educators engaged in fully reflective action – What controlling principle or reflective worldview determines the overall standards and directions of intellectual and educational activity?

¶58

In an historical perspective, through the extended present, powerful protean powers are permeating all sectors of life. What basic worldview, what sense of life, forms as people engage in the everyday use of these powers? What structuring convictions, through which people see and interpret the world, do these experiences suggest?

¶59

Such questions may offend those still preoccupied by the post-modern debunking of grand narratives in the West, of modern rationalistic and metaphysical pretensions. Educators must engage a generative worldview, not as metaphysicians, but as historical sociologists. George Santayana, who found himself immersed in slightly earlier variations on this ageless struggle between doubt and conviction, recognized the ineluctable condition in his wonderful essay on Scepticism and Animal Faith. [Note 51] As thinkers, we can be aware pervasively that our knowledge is imperfect, that every declamation demands doubt. But we live not by thought alone. In our deeds, we resolve ambiguities; we set doubts aside. And thinkers, too, must act.

¶60

As humans unable to escape the burdens of living in history, we must recognize, as Weber did so well, that life offers us simultaneously both the vocation of science, the relentless questioning of all things apparent, and the vocation of politics, the willingness to act purposefully and consequentially, uncertain what the outcome is to be. [Note 52] The historical field of action, within which we live our lives, imperfectly embodies diverse principles. To perfect and improve the actuality of living ideals, people must be both aware and committed. In thought, all things must be tentative and relative; but in action they become definitive and final. These two sides of life take special form in the academic realm, which is not a realm consisting one-sidedly in thought alone. Ideas, the fruits of questioning scholars, often conflict with significant consequences in the world of action. When ideas contend in the realm of action, it is the political vocation of the scholar to reflect, to weigh, and to take a stand on controlling principles. This vocation is obligatory. To take no stand is simply the weakest stand of all.

¶61

Here is the irony: the play of doubt, which brings diverse ideas into contention with one another within the field of action, entails the thinker to take a stand in favor of those principles that he deems in his political vocation to be most worthy of taking with steadfast conviction as if they were true. Building a fundamental worldview is the political vocation of the skeptical scholar.

¶62

Historically, the contemporary academic enterprise has its roots in enlightenment ideals. [Note 53] There is perhaps no better example of what we mean here by the political vocation of the scholar than the characteristic intellectual practice of Enlightenment thinkers. In this practice, rational skeptics embodied a passionate commitment, in an act of animal faith, to reason, to the possibility of progress, to universal rights and human betterment through the spread of knowledge and education, to unflagging combat against superstition and ignorance. Écrasez l'infâme! Faced with consequential ideas in portentous conflict with each other, the reflective thinker must act on the political vocation of thought and take a stand affirming those ideas that disinterested reflection judges to be most beneficial in the conduct of life. So Voltaire and his peers acted. From them the modern intellectual enterprise stemmed. Whither are we carrying it?

¶63

A major theme of twentieth-century Western culture has been a sustained and many-sided critique of this Enlightenment commitment, this commitment to enlightenment. Over the past fifty years or more, scholars have increasingly shied away from embracing the political vocation that is their rightful one. Taking no stand for one or another worldview, or taking the stand that all worldviews are equally pernicious and radically unsound, does not make the clash of ideas disappear. It leaves the field to ideologues of party and market, to the purveyors of sectarian dogmas, and to the cruel megalomania of the blind nationalist. By not taking a stand for a fundamental worldview, scholars fail to secure and strengthen the most basic sources of their action and influence. Such withdrawal has spread far too far through academe as many scholars have retreated into a self-protective pursuit of rigor, deprecating comprehensive ideas as unworthy of serious professional effort. Powerful rationalizations support these self-interested professional retreats – the desire not to err in the eyes of critical colleagues; the effort to chart a predictable path to grants, to tenure, to promotion; the urge to limit, to stabilize, to control the demands on the personal comfort of psyche and spirit. [Note 54]

¶64

At their best, the thoughtful critiques of enlightenment aspirations rest on a largely tacit sense that the continuous, unchecked application of enlightenment principles has started to do more harm than good in the world. Good principles in excess become destructive. Too much schooling, too much bureaucracy, too much material production, too much human intervention in the natural environment, too many births with too few deaths, too much consumption of resources – it all exhausts, enchains, and disenchants. Such reasoning may be sound as far as it goes, but the critique is sound only if the repertoire of means for the pursuit of enlightenment aspirations is fixed and unchanging. So it seems. So the worry goes: the given forms of action are the best of all possible forms of action, and hence, the historical impasse is at hand; those familiar agencies, which we risk exercising to excess, are the only agencies with which we might advance towards enlightenment ideals; therefore, we must turn away, towards other, lesser goals, or suffer historical shipwreck. [Note 55]

¶65

This doubting diagnosis stems from European experience and thought in the first half of the twentieth century, from the shock of the Great War, so uselessly destructive, from Depression economies that ceased to work, from Fascist and Nazi brutalization, from a second, sapping war of unprecedented civilian destruction, ending with the huge mushroom of destruction flattening Nagasaki. Little wonder these upheavals were followed by a fifty-year freeze on historic action with the major powers locked in Cold War. Western self-doubt about the efficacy of its aspirations to enlightenment was largely the conceptual complement to this Cold War check on historical action.

¶66

Times change. Let us not weigh whether this doubting diagnosis was right or wrong; let us observe that it is becoming historically passé. The human world is in rapid metamorphosis. It is as if history, having exhausted the creative possibilities of the nation-state and its attendant civilization, is entering into an Hegelian Aufhebung, a transformative upheaval of existing forms and resources into an unexpected system of new potentiality, through which the human spirit can continue, can extend, its enduring self-creation. [Note 56] People, all sorts of people, across nations, ethnicities, cultures, and class, exhibit an intense curiosity, an intrigued sense of wonder with the new technologies. In community centers for the poor, in the meeting places of senior citizens, on planes and in trains, in homes of the sophisticated and the unpretentious, in all manner of offices, everywhere people are eager to get on the net, to exchange email, to play with the possibilities. These reactions go far beyond the American penchant for gadgets and gizmos. These reactions are the outward sign of the inward spirit silently experiencing rebirth, that transformative upheaval beyond which vast, uncharted possibilities unfold. Educators, your work is the driving force of that newly unfolding epoch.

¶67

Against this renewal, rhetoric of coming after, post-modernism in its various forms, appears increasingly to be an arbitrary, ungrounded pose. We are not coming after, but going onward, traversing a new plane of action. It again becomes possible, even necessary, to assert articulate views about the value of affirmative effort for the character of the human enterprise. We have consequential choices to make. We are inventing epochal forms of human culture. Let us do so, awake and intent. Let us, the world around, use new tools of communicative action to carry the work of enlightenment forward to unparalleled fulfillments. The work of enlightenment is far from historically finished, neither finished by being completed, nor finished by being dead or exhausted. The great destabilizing tragedies that potentially loom, not behind, but ahead, arise, not from an excess of enlightenment, but from the archetypal deficiencies that call forth the pursuit of enlightenment – from sectarian conflicts, nationalist inhumanity, and collective ignorance. Beliefs contend. Ideas still clash. Ignorance crushes multitudes. Where should the scholar stand? Ideals of universal education are all too far from fulfillment, even by traditional measures. And enlightenment is a fast moving goal, not a stable state: if we measure education as mastery of the knowledge and skills requisite to cope effectively with the complexities of human circumstances, people everywhere may be rapidly receding in their educational attainments. These attainments are remaining relatively static, yet issues for global action are becoming ones of an all-inclusive scale and astounding internal complexity and the available collective experience for dealing with them ranges from the negligible to the ineffectual. [Note 57]

¶68

Educators, all peoples, have reason to fear historic drift, and to perceive the possibility of a liberating, fulfilling historic course – a better future that we have to make. As educators increasingly work with the new technologies in the extended present, we experience a buoyant antidote to the pessimisms of the recent past, at once so weary and so wary. Current innovations insinuate into daily circumstances reasons to recognize that the relevant agencies of action are neither finite nor fixed. The new information technologies provide potent, under-utilized tools for pursuing the ideals of universal education and the right of all to engage as equals in the common pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Engaged with emerging possibilities, working to apply digital technologies to education and life, people experience a sense of historical empowerment. In the experiential, common sense of the new enlightenment, digital technologies are an expression of the power of reason in human life, making plausible the hope and expectation that thought in action is still becoming an ever-more effective asset in the service of human betterment. Educators are far from having made our mission obsolete, and the digital technologies provide an important new means to advance markedly forward towards unfinished enlightenment aspirations.

¶69

In its political vocation, academic theory should advance a credo, renewing the progressive bond to posterity. In the natural order of things, humans are the beings that enter into the struggle to survive, aware individually of their personal mortality. I shall die: this personal awareness of impending death has deep effects as a condition of life. [Note 58] It determines two of humanity’s distinguishing qualities. It is the awareness of personal mortality that makes humans become the animals that are social and political by nature. The individual who knows that he or she is mortal, destined to die, can achieve survival only through the future of his or her collectivity. The person who knows that his or her death impends must either despair or sublimate the sense of self into the selfhood of an enduring group. The second distinguishing characteristic then comes into play: the human commitment to a social self entails a cultural and educational commitment to one's progeny. Aware of personal mortality, humans become educating animals. Humans take many years to develop from infancy to maturity and to ensure survival through the collectivity, members of it must nurture the young and impart to them the distinguishing characteristics of the group. Education is what people do, individually and through groups, to develop the shared capacity at the disposal of their progeny for pursuing meaningful well-being through their future lives. The great variations on human culture are complex constructions through which mortal individuals create transcendent selves, for the betterment of which they live.

¶70

This transcendent, collective self, binding mortal individuals into an immortal enterprise, creates a culture of enlightenment, the progressive bond with posterity. This bond with posterity is the most powerful of the cultural constructions that humans have devised to deny personal death through the life of their social self. [Note 59] Rational persons, who struggle to survive, knowing they are going to die, naturally develop a commitment to the on-going bearers of their social selves, through which they try to pass to their progeny the possibility of a more secure, productive fulfillment than they themselves have enjoyed. [Note 60] This progressive commitment to posterity has driven enlightenment aspirations, and it continues to drive them wherever people have a social, political self of enduring character. The creative bond with posterity, gives the work of educators meaning with respect to the basic human condition, helping to construct the collective effort at survival despite the mortality each person suffers. It follows from this bond that educators are the great universal class, comprising the young throughout the course of their own formation, comprising their parents for whom the young carry forward the hopes of living intimacy; and comprising all of those who are mature, whose grasp of an enduring meaning for their lives requires that they nurture the capacities of those who come after to carry forward their dreams and work, for them so actual yet so sadly incomplete.

¶71

Critics who complain that digital tools are not culturally neutral are correct. [Note 61] These tools are expressions of enlightenment reason, the work of abstraction in operation. They subject time to an intense, rigorous subdividing and stretch out a speeding sequence of either-ors that subject matter and energy and the human spirit to amazing conformities. But from this exacting rational discipline, unprecedented capacities for nuance, suggestion and response, interaction, reflection, and choice arise. [Note 62] Should we shrink from all this, as these critics imply? The digital tools renew the opportunity to reach out to all persons with the glorious challenge – "Sapere aude! 'Have the courage to use your own reason!" [Note 63] The world, as it is, is not in equipoise. Educators working with the new technologies command potent resources, historically generative tools. Educators need to look beyond the myopic topic of computers in education to the question of what we can and should accomplish as educators making full use of our digital tools and every other resource in our avail. Educators have formidable instruments of action. Educators should use them to pursue historically challenging goals – achieving the fulfillment of basic human rights; securing physical well-being for all in a sustainable global environment; eliminating prejudice, poverty, despair, and disease. Progress is neither automatic nor secure. By the same token, it is neither impossible nor illusory. It is a work achieved through intelligent effort, a measure of fulfillment in life. That is the progressive bond with posterity that educators strengthen as we pursue enlightened hopes and aspirations.

¶72

To read the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen [Note 64] as preparation for watching the nightly news or reading the daily paper is humbling: human behavior, locally and globally, is far from meeting the measure of such principles. Higher criticism easily deconstructs the language with which thinkers asserted the abstract universals of our political heritage. Thus "the rights of man" is a self-deflating locution for critics modestly alert to gender biases. Nevertheless, its principles, imperfectly phrased, have life and death import depending on whether they do or do not control the formation of intention as persons equipped with powerful instruments of destruction engage in social action in the heat of hate, resentment, and fear. Humans use abstractions both to enable action, and to ennoble it, to determine controlling intentions, and to adhere to defining restraints. In the social construction of a new educational system, educators need to possess and to impart principles suitable for determining intentions in a world in which the instruments of action are global, complex, and massive in effects.

¶73

Our world is the posterity of people who pursued demanding visions, initiating a rule of law, industrial production, systematic science, effective medicine, universal schooling. They asserted these possibilities often while living under atrocious conditions, and the measures of dignity, comfort, and well-being that we enjoy derive largely from their efforts, self-sacrificial yet creative. Still, our well-being is neither stable nor universal. And that of our progeny is not guaranteed. As educators now exploit the pedagogical power of digital tools, we need to be equally bold and deep, extending to our posterity a fundamental advance in the historic potentials of the human enterprise. Thus, in coming decades, people must extend their construct of posterity as they cope with immense complexities in an effort to secure a stable, global future. The ecological and geo-political challenges present stupendous difficulties to educators. Full historical use of the digital technologies is essential to meet them. To meet the challenge, educators must use every resource at our avail and harness to our effort all the power that we can.

¶74

"Enlightenment," and labels like it, are retrospective characterizations. They come into use because people historically engaged substantial problems and opportunities, accomplishing results of enduring significance. If educators using digital technologies can be no more effective in addressing the fundamental challenges of our time than we could be without those tools, our historic meaning is marginal. To construct a new educational system, educators need to engage the great problems and opportunities of our extended present with enduring effort and epochal effect.

• Suddenly, human productive and reproductive power has vastly expanded the scale and complexity of action and consumption, raising deep doubts about the long-term stability of both polities and ecologies. Can the world's peoples educate themselves sufficiently to make this expanded scale and scope of action both sustainable and perfectible?
• Commerce, technology, industry, communication, global transportation have all thrown the world's peoples into highly organized, rationalized, mechanized surroundings, choreographed with intricate, abstract interdependencies in which the moving meanings of life seem challenged, suppressed by civilization, magnifying and multiplying the discontents each feels in accepting its complex constraints. In this iron cage of modernity, can the world's peoples achieve through their education both the measure of meaning and the command of competence with which they can make it a habitat conducive to their full human fulfillment?
• Through the foreseeable future, on the local, national, and global scale, economic inequality and cultural differences are going to persist, fomenting resentment and fear, misunderstanding and hostility, while even the lone extremist can wield weapons that challenge the stability of societies and states. Can the world's peoples develop educationally the ability to celebrate human differences, allowing everyone around the globe to answer that most difficult question – "Can't we all just get along?" – with an acclaim of robust and joyous affirmation?

These questions define bracing challenges. The human worth of technology in education depends substantially on how it helps educators answer them well with historic effect.