Global Dialogues

The demise of two grand promises of secular modernity—namely, a classless society and a world harmoniously globalized by capital and consumption—has generated a widespread sense of political, social, and existential powerlessness. 

As modern Western states consolidated power and churches lost their monopoly on knowledge, the citizen to be formed became the rational, autonomous individual defined through merit and formal equality. Yet, while this project was framed as democratic and emancipatory, it also produced new forms of exclusion embedded in epistemic, cultural, and spiritual hierarchies that structured modern education from its outset.

By the twenty-first century, neoliberal rationality has widely reframed education as an investment in “human capital,” valued primarily for its contribution to productivity and competitiveness. The expanding “banking model” of instruction treats schools and universities as corporate systems, where degrees function as commodities and students as consumers of credentials oriented toward employability. Even more troubling in the current scenario, ideological polarization and the censorship of contested curricular topics undermine critical inquiry and intensify divisions around identity.

In this context, education risks being detached from its function as a public good, increasingly unable to sustain shared frameworks of understanding. However, beyond mirroring the contradictions of secular modernity and the ensuing crisis of meaning, education can also help confront powerlessness by delineating new horizons of collective sense-making, shared agency, and renewal. 

Education, from Instrumental to Existential 

As wars proliferate, democratic institutions lose legitimacy, the climate crisis accelerates, and artificial intelligence transforms the conditions of knowledge, work, and social life, our growing sense of powerlessness poses a challenge for education that is not only diagnostic or critical, but fundamentally reconstructive: how can spaces of shared agency be rebuilt in conditions that systematically erode them?

If, as educational philosopher Gert Biesta warns, “learnification” empties education of ethical and civic purpose, and neoliberalism has turned education into a “disimagination machine” (to echo critical pedagogy scholar Henry Giroux), then the question is no longer only how to reform institutions of education, but, more deeply, what kinds of educational practices might still enable us to reconstruct the capacity to think, imagine, and act together, rather than fostering competition, fragmentation, or withdrawal into isolated forms of subjectivity.

Education can offer a new communal horizon of meaning by turning from instrumental to existential. Following Paul Ricœur, I use “horizon” not as a line of demarcation that excludes and imposes closure, but, rather, as a space of encounters and critical engagement, a dynamic field of possibilities where new ways of being, knowing, and relating can emerge. Within this transformative horizon, education can promote intergenerational and transnational dialogues and collaborations. To face the crises that define our age, educational institutions, cultural organizations, and public forums must therefore cultivate communities of inquiry capable of bringing diverse historical experiences and intellectual traditions into conversation. We need a new social contract with younger generations. We owe them the tools and the trust to create better narratives than those circulating now. Education can be at the forefront of this challenge by understanding itself as a practice of continuity rather than a succession of discrete interventions, thereby recovering a sense of temporal depth that, while inviting us into the co-creation of the future, grounds us in connection to the past. 

To rebuild the forms of shared agency and imaginative engagement that contemporary crises have weakened, we must place the humanities at the center. More than ever, we need them to re-humanize curricula and institutions, renewing their formative and transformative potential. Against the economization of knowledge and the increasing compartmentalization of learning, the humanities restore the very conditions of thought—attention, deep reflection, complexity, critical interpretation, and the capacity to see the world through other eyes. 

The humanities are thus not a luxury but a vital form of public reason, a laboratory of meaning and imagination that forges education’s responsibility to the social, political, ethical, and emotional texture of our own lives. They operate as a meta-toolkit that organically blends the conceptual, interpretive, and methodological instruments of individual disciplines, enabling a reflexive understanding of how knowledge is produced, contextualized, and transmitted across domains. They help create modes of learning and experience that restore connection to the self and the world by rediscovering shared human concerns, thus fostering civic growth as much as intellectual achievement. They are hence indispensable if education is to recover its vocation as a public good and as a privileged site for collective renewal.

Pillars of a Renewed Humanism

An intergenerational and re-humanized education can confront powerlessness by nurturing key dimensions of a new communal horizon of meaning:

• An Ethical Dimension

The humanities re-center the qualitative over the quantitative, helping learners deliberate about what kind of life and society are worth building. They recover and reinterpret human experience, functioning as the repositories of how humans have grappled with vulnerabilities, hopes, and purpose across times and cultures. They cultivate ethical leadership also by inviting us to learn from non-Western and premodern traditions that conceive of progress not as linear advancement (an enduring legacy of Western Enlightenment thought) but as stewardship, balance, and harmony between nature and culture. By engaging these neglected archives, we can rediscover alternative vocabularies of value (care, compassion, good faith, respect, solidarity, dignity, justice, responsibility) that are sidelined by the market’s logic and by the spectacularization of power.

• A Relational Dimension

Neoliberalism isolates individuals as economic actors. Social media, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence deepen this isolation—and often exacerbate divisions––by relocating human interaction to virtual domains of simulation and abstraction. The humanities counter this trend by re-centering the interpersonal and the collective. At their best, they also provide the foundations for communities of belonging that are neither tribal nor exclusionary. By encouraging dialogue across generations, cultures, and political differences, they create conditions for solidarity that can withstand disagreement without collapsing into polarization. 

Responding to our need for something that we can recognize as ours, able to bring us together across differences, the humanities invite us to treat knowledge and culture as a commons rather than commodities. They foster empathy—the imaginative capacity to inhabit other lives and perspectives—and turn private emotion into a space of collective resonance, restoring the connective tissue of human experience. They remind us that meaning arises in relationship and that we are constitutively relational: our identities, rights, and responsibilities are co-created with others. In so doing, they teach us humility by pointing to the limits of any system of thought. They foster a global awareness based upon epistemic pluralism—acknowledging the co-existence of multiple worldviews and modes of inquiry, each situated and partial.

• An Ecological Dimension 

In the Anthropocene, education and meaning cannot be anthropocentric. Because the humanities invite us into continual negotiations of difference that enhance our capacity to think, feel, and act with others and with the world, they also expand our ethics of caring and sharing beyond the merely human dimension, highlighting our interdependence with non-human systems. The humanities thus provide the foundation for a planetary consciousness that recovers a sense of the Earth not merely as a backdrop to human history but as a living context of meaning. Therefore, re-humanizing education implies responsibility for the more-than-human world, learning not only how to survive but how to live mindfully within the limits of what we have left after the irreversible damage that our culture of exploitation has inflicted upon the environment.

• A Spiritual Dimension

While secular modernity tried to exclude forms of transcendence, spiritual longing persists, even in an increasingly disenchanted world. Every society needs ways to answer ultimate questions like: Who are we? What are we for? What can we hope for? 

The horizon of meaning offered by a humanistic education reawakens our capacity to feel that our lives participate in something larger and deeper than just absorption and consumption of information. Without falling back on religious or ideological dogmatism, the humanities open up a transcendent dimension—they renew our capacity for awe; they re-sensitize us to beauty, love, contemplation, wonder, mystery, and the endless quest for purpose and truth.

New Horizons of Possibilities

A horizon always moves as we move. Likewise, the humanities do not deliver meaning once and for all; they keep meaning open and they form subjects capable of renewing it through dialogue and imagination. When we entrust imagination and creativity to artificial intelligence, we outsource them to algorithmic processes that simulate innovation without lived experience or ethical reflection. A re-humanized education expands the imagination of the possible by engaging the depths of human meaning and the open-endedness of human thought in the service of the common good. It constructs spaces for reinvention through shared acts of world-making, including worlds and systems of knowledge that already exist but remain unseen because they have often been relegated to the margins. 

This capacity to envision otherwise comes from the power of utopian imagination and speculative thinking as forms of action. It is not only hate that begins with language—words can change the world for the better. This hopeful outlook does not amount to naïve, acritical optimism. The exhaustion of our faith in progress confronts us with our finitude and precariousness, yet a humanistic education teaches us to accept the limits and challenges of the human condition without renouncing our search for meaning and purpose. Our shared fragilities and our need for interdependence become the very conditions for value-driven engagement.

For all these reasons, the humanities classroom constitutes the quintessential site of resistance against a pervasive technocratic rationality and a market mentality that are colonizing all aspects of human lives. It offers a safe space for interpretation, dialogue, and imagination, where meaning is not consumed individually but created and questioned together. 

What other forms of learning as spaces of transformation and reinvention can we cultivate inside and beyond the spectrum of educational institutions? As we—educators, scholars, intellectuals, writers, artists—take on this challenge, the Georgetown Global Dialogues represent a promising model of public outreach and aspirational intergenerational engagement that calls upon the creative capacities and ethical responsibilities of our common humanity and points toward forms of collective renewal through which shared agency can emerge from powerlessness.