Technocracy or Democracy? Educating Citizens in the Era of Automation and Simulation

Proceeding from the notion that the crucial relationship between education, citizenship and democracy (Arendt, 1951, 1958; Banfield, 1958; Dewey, 1916; Gramsci, 1948–1951) should, arguably, no longer be considered mere hypothesis, there are two key questions on which to reflect when speaking of citizenship (Bellamy, 2008; Marshall, 1950) in a global world system: firstly, how can a systemic approach to complexity in education and research contribute to democracy and citizenship, and secondly, what does it mean today, in the civilisation of autonomation and simulation, to be citizens? These two queries intersect another fundamental issue regarding the urgency of ‘a new social contract’ (1996) between citizenry and governance. The first point hinges on a thorny issue which appears to be common among many nations, that is, the progressive and paradoxical lowering of the quality of educational and training institutions and their educators (ISTAT 2018, 2024; OECD, 2011, 2019, 2021; OECD PISA, 2022, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c, 2023d, 2024a, 2024b, 2024c, 2024d, 2024e; UNESCO, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024) in today’s hyper-technological ‘knowledge society’, which directly affects the preliminary conditions for fostering a participatory citizenry. Educational environments that increasingly delegate responsibility and didactic processes to technology, under the mistaken impression that teaching know-how and skills, in particular technical and digital skills, is more important than teaching critical thinking and the capacity to ponder ‘why’, lead inevitably to an incapacity for genuine participation in democracy on the part of future citizens. Furthermore, the inability to recognise the unpredictable and emergent properties of complexity, along with an acritical endorsement of technical and technological procedures and guidance, impoverish democratic systems both at the base and at higher levels, for example, among political deciders, whose vision for action is limited to the imposition of top-down measures and models that stifle participation, limit freedom and inevitably create a mere simulation of democratic process (Dahl, 1998; Dominici, 2022). This mistaken approach is not, however, new to society: even before the digital revolution, academic studies on these subjects invariably analysed and explained the concepts of citizenship and democracy exclusively under the legal aspects of norms, regulations, political rights and duties, attempting to reduce the complexity of living elements to mere technocratic and technoscientific dimensions, a nearsighted vision which persists today (Dominici, 2023b).