Education as a practice of freedom requires us not just to dismantle the teacher/student hierarchy but also dethrone anthropocentrism and embrace and develop posthumanities in place of human sciences and natural sciences of today. The arrival of new technologies like Chat GPT-4 has certainly challenged the teacher/student hierarchy as well as the consumerist modelled classroom. But sill these developments may not really usher in 360 degrees revolution that will transform the scene of education as it might still not be centered on the reality of the student learners. With all its studentcentric strengths, it will fail on parameters of reality centrality which is so very import for education to be holistic practice of freedom. The best way to critically create our practices of education rooted in reality is to make a pradigmn shift from present athropocentric models that have divided drastically the natural and human sciences to posthumanities that considers the interrelations and interdependence of human and nature seriously. This change will require us to invent our school and the classroom again.
The new classroom that we envisage cannot be human-centric alone. It is challenged to think with, through and for nature alongside humans. It is a challenge to cross the anthropological limit and enter what is called posthumanism. This would mean that we do not just study sociology, economics or history as subjects that deal with humans alone but expand our study domain to include everything snd interrelations in nature. This may become discomforting as it challenges the boundaries that we have cherished for so long. But education as a practice of freedom has to courageously take up this border crossing seriously as it has the potentials to unleash a revolution of education 360 degrees. The decentred human perspective of posthumanities can be truly emancipative. It will be less conditioned by patriarchy, casteism, racism, ethnocentrism etc. Giving up the privileged location of humanity within the academy will usher in a new revolution that will challenge the we have built and are running our world .
Reality based education will have to bring how the human and nonhuman entangle, crisscoss and branchout or split in real life. The present control model will have to give way to the care model. Posthumanities have the challenge to draw a syllabus and curriculum that will enable the human and the nonhuman to flourish together. This means that humanity does not have to live in an oppositional relation with nature but have to learn to joufully live its embedded anf embodied existence within nature. The reigning model that is anthropocentric sets humans against nature and leads us to see our development in the subordination of nature. This is why we might trace the root causes of the climate crises in our classroom. The threat of Chat GPT-4 to the classroom is a welcome development . It has the power of dismantling of the classroom modelled on Plato’s cave . But we have the challenge to engineer a shift from athropocentric classroom to classroom of posthumanities .
The new classroom of posthumanities has the challenge to get out of the prison house of Cartesian binaries. Abandoning this logic, we will be enabled to view reality holistically and make peace with other humans and also between humans and nature. The new school has to become a space of peace education as only peace with nature and peace among us can save us from annihilation. Therefore, the new classroom has the challenge to redefine what it means to be human. The old vision of humans defined our destruction of our environment. We need to find a way of being human that respects the autonomy of nature and assumes our role as care takers of nature. Hence,the new classroom may have to embrace posthuman sciences. Especially our humanities and even natural sciences have to embed and embody the posthuman spirit . Therefore, our sociology, economics, history, psychology etc have to become posthuman sociology, economics history, psychology etc. Our natural sciences also have tonbroaden thier applicative scope and move from the human-centric applications to cosmic one’s. Therefore, the new school and new classroom have the challenge to embrace technologies like Chat GPT-4 to achieve its emancipative goals.
