Creating schools that prepare for the future

In a society such as ours, the generation of knowledge has become, in all probability, the most important form of work, productivity and competitiveness.
Strategically dominant activities increasingly take place in global interdependence. In this setting, the school has gained strategic value, but as it gradually leaves behind the parameters established by industrial society, it has lost the traditional role it played in preserving knowledge and the monopoly it held on transmitting this knowledge from generation to generation.
The organizational solutions characteristic of the traditional school often prove to be little suited to providing a response to such a changing and complex context as this one, in which the acceleration of innovative processes has immediately been countered by the generation of obsolete practices and ideas.
In this climate, schools, just like other sectors in our society, face the challenge of finding their position once again.
Schools must seek to become centres in which teachers and pupils can find the opportunity to reconstruct the meaning of educational activity and open this activity up through new ties with the educational community; in the networked society, now, more than ever, this community must be understood in its broadest possible sense.