1. Strengthening the Role of the Teacher
The proliferation of digital tools, emergence of a post-Gutenberg galaxy, and rise of AI have transformed knowledge acquisition. With all the world's knowledge just a few clicks away—at least in terms of technical access—the traditional role of the teacher is being challenged. The teacher is no longer the only source, transmitter, and gatekeeper of knowledge. This begs several questions, are teachers still needed? Can online education replace traditional teaching roles? What role should the teacher preserve in the transmission of knowledge?
I am convinced that our experience with online education during Covid has given clear answers to these questions. Our research from this period has shown that the teacher’s classic role in the educational process may evolve, but cannot be replaced. Even with these new developments, teachers have an important role to facilitate students' independent research, inform about both the opportunities and risks of digital space and help them discern useful and valid information. The teacher’s role is not only anchored by their lexical knowledge, but by their epistemological knowledge. Teachers have a key role in illuminating the pathways of knowledge, helping organize data into information, and developing student’s literacy.
As Nicholas Tate points out in his book, The Conservative Case for Education, published by MCC Press, the Socratic master-student relationship remains a valid pedagogical dynamic, based on a continuous and personal dialogue between teacher and student. The framework may change and technical progress may open up new methodological possibilities, but these are superficial changes, the heart of teaching has remained the same for almost two thousand five hundred years.
2. The Dominant Role of Classical Knowledge
One of the most important and recent philosophical debates in education revolves around the development of competences and the transmission of material knowledge. Recent trends have emphasized teaching creativity and the traditional socio-educational function of schools has been called into question. In schools, the mission of transmitting classical knowledge has been displaced by a mission to ensure social well-being and individual fulfilment. This new approach is centered around the idea that competences such as creativity are essential to thrive and must be developed in classroom.
In contrast, as argued by the thinkers cited in Tate’s The Conservative Case for Education, such as T.S. Eliot and Oakeshott, the main role of primary and secondary education is cultural indoctrination as well as acquisition and mastery of norms inherited from classical knowledge. This approach presupposes the existence of a unique cultural canon and the necessity of its transmission.
As T.S. Eliot pointed out, this cultural canon is not in contrast with creative development. Creativity researchers agree that a solid knowledge base is essential for initiating the creative process, and that understanding past contexts often leads to new discoveries. As Nancy Salay, a researcher at Queen's University, has emphasized, an extensive neural network, the basis for developing creativity, can only be built on a wide range of subject knowledge.
This means that the transmission of literacy and initiation into a common set of inherited ideas, is an essential educational goal, even if the canon will - naturally - change over time as new inventions and discoveries emerge.
3. Education as a Tool for Community Building
In Reclaiming Classical Education, a recent volume of studies published by MCC's Learning Institute, I wrote about the Aristotelian legacy of education. In particular, I argued that rhetoric remains an essential part of classical scholarship, even 2,500 years after its golden age. I am more convinced than ever, that as the Alpha generation socializes in the online and offline space, the role of real communities will become more important. Identities created in the digital world along with their respective peer pressure and contemporary milieu can distort the value of real human connections. Identity is now defined by digital self-representation, and education has a necessary and important role in reconnecting students with real human relationships.
Rhetoric has a key role to play in this, it can teach students how to create communities through language. The legacy of ancient rhetoricians offers a roadmap for identifying shared values and points of connection encoded in linguistic formulas and metacommunicative cues.
Thus, it is the teacher's responsibility to cultivate community connections—bringing us back to the first point: the need for personality, personal presence, and the teacher’s ability to organize and inspire. This role complements cultural initiation and helps make education future-proof for Generation Alpha and beyond.
