25 BEYOND THE EMERGENCY CIVILIZATION: THE URGENCY OF EDUCATING TOWARD UNPREDICTABILITY Piero Dominici University of Perugia, Italy ABSTRACT The ongoing anthropological transformation urges the rethinking of educa- tion, underlining the inadequacy of our schools and universities in dealing with hypercomplexity, that is, with the global extension of all political, social, and cultural processes and with their indeterminacy, interdependence, and intercon- nection. The idea that educational processes are questions of a purely technical/ technological nature, solely a problem of skills and know-how, is the “great mistake” of the hypertechnological society, based on the illusion of being able to measure and quantify everything, to eliminate error and unpredictability, and to achieve total control and rationality. It is necessary to rethink educa- tion radically because the extraordinary scientifc discoveries and the dynamics of the new technologies have completely overturned the complex interaction between biological and cultural evolution, doing away with the borders between the natural and the artifcial. Emergence and emergency themselves are structural features of complex systems (living, social, and human systems), rendered hypercomplex through today’s acceleration and virality, regarding not only education and socialization but also the representations and percep- tions of all systemic processes. The merging of felds of knowledge and an Higher Education in Emergencies: Best Practices and Benchmarking Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning, Volume 53, 25–45 Copyright © 2024 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 2055-3641/doi:10.1108/S2055-364120230000053003