Chapter 3. Education without faces in the age of existential deficit: how globalisation, post-truth and the politics of meaninglessness depersonalise pedagogy

We live in a time when education has found itself at the epicentre of global change – not only technological, economic or political, but above all anthropological. It still functions, reforms, digitises, reports – but at the same time loses its ability to see people, hear their requests, respond to their existential challenges. In an era of radical civilisational upheavals – war, climate change, pandemics, algorithmisation of thinking – education, instead of being a response to anxiety and fragmentation, is increasingly becoming yet another tool for managing instability.

This sense of loss begins at the level of language. Educational discourse is saturated with terms such as ‘human capital,’ ‘resource provision,’ ‘staff efficiency,’ ‘knowledge platform,’ and ‘education quality management.’ These formulas are not just stylistic conveniences, but linguistic markers of the loss of a humanistic perspective. A language that thinks of education as a market, people as carriers of competencies, and learning as a process of certification excludes the subject of dignity from the pedagogical space.

Against this backdrop, a new anomaly is emerging: people are physically present in education, but ontologically absent. They may have access to knowledge, but lose their sense of meaning; they may receive grades, but do not experience dignity as recognition. This gives rise to the phenomenon of cognitive simulation: learning continues, but without internal growth. All this creates a new pedagogical reality, which would be more accurately called post-education — that is, one that has lost the ability to keep the person at the centre.