Learning to be Human

Luiz Oosterbeek (CIPSH, IPT)

Abstract: Humans, through their evolutionary path, have followed a selection mechanism (neoteny) that requires a major investment in education, delaying the full entrance in adulthood and that eventually let to a uniquely complex capacity to learn and modify behavior throughout life. This capacity, however, is fundamentally trained in the early years, because it requires the valorization of flexibility (which is partially biologically inherited, but remains as a virtual possibility to be trained upon demand) and critical judgement (which does not come as inherited, and results from trial and experiment). Both characteristics are present in other species, but they reach a particularly complex level among humans. Being trained competences, though, they ultimately depend on how, in cultural terms, the learning mechanism (to be used on a self-served basis throughout life) is initially conveyed, and on which values are embedded in it. Therefore, pedagogy on one hand and philosophy on the other, are the basics of an approach to education. In this brief contribution, I will focus on the second, which is an everchanging framework, since it must always be designed for specific societies needs. I will argue that, although humans circulate around the world for millennia, very few human beings, in the past or today, have been challenged to become properly humans, in the sense of building a human identity, conscience and set of values that moves beyond different scales of ethnicity. Some individuals, who approached such an understanding, tended to be highly praised, but also considered as exception (which is another word for abnormal, i.e., out of the normal pattern). The contemporary global integration, from the digital technologies to the pandemic disasters, challenge human beings to become human persons, and this is an education need. How can this be done, against the “evidences” of phenomenological appearances, and what can we learn from remote past examples, will be raised as topics for further research.