LAUSR

A lot has been written in the last years about post—modernity or postmodernism, but few have paid attention to the few scholars or thinkers of Continental Europe that have expressed profound doubts about the prevailing scholarship; first, because Continental Europe is not the leading culture anymore, the English-medium or Anglo-saxon world has become the driving force nowadays; seconly, because this kind of critical thinking is disturbing (Barcellona, 1996; Touraine, 1993). What we call postmodernism may be seen as totally modern yet; it is still part of the model of civilization that we may call modernity. It is just the last phase of the modern age, but it is still part of it. And to realise this it is enough to do something that few Westerners try: to go to other civilizations, and from these other world views, such as India, for instance, we may conclude that postmodernists are still modern; they still share the main features of modern Western civilization. Raimon Panikkar was an Indian/European philosopher and scholar devoted to intercultural studies and intercultural dialogue; from his own intercultural experience he dared to state that the Western world still drags a deep and unconscious inertia of cultural imperialism at the antipodes of the need of the time, which is intercultural dialogue (Panikkar, 1993). By looking at themselves only and overlooking other civilizations, Western scholarship and institutions are blind to the real problems of the world and to the challenges for the future, which have nothing to do with postmodernism but rather with paradigm shift. As we suggested above, postmodernism is but the last stage of modern history and the challenge that humanity faces is a shift of paradigm towards more holistic and humanistic paradigm overcoming the inherent reductionsim and technocracy of the modern age. Philosophers such as E. Laszlo and scientists such as F. Capra have written extensively about this, but again few have listened to them till now (Capra, 1983; Laszlo, 2006). This is the real challenge for the future of humanity, and this challenge has a pedagogic translation: from the merely academic and utilitarian mainstream school system towards an integral form of educationt that educates the whole human being, and mirrors this new holistic paradigm evolving in the last decades through quantum physics and other disciplines while questioning modern materialism and mechanism. This is also an education for consciousness—the key factor for quantum physicists as it was for Socrates or Shankara.