THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE IN POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY: TOWARD THE NEW PARADIGM OF EDUCATION? Sergiy Kurbatov Institute of Higher Education, National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine (UKRAINE) sergiy.kurbatov@gmail.com Abstract I start from the famous scheme of historical development of our civilization by American sociologist Daniel Bell. He identified 3 main stages of such development: 1) agrarian society; 2)industrial society; 3)post-industrial society. What is the nature of knowledge at each of these stages? In agrarian society knowledge is a kind of sacred access to creation, “participation mystique” in creative activities of god or gods. If we would analyse human nature at this stage, it would be a kind of shift from “biological” to “social” nature. Or, with certain simplification, a “construction of social”. In typical industrial society this shift is successfully completed. Knowledge here is an opportunity to create and to expand a new world, which is relevant to social nature of human beings. In post-industrial society knowledge is a kind of access to “creation of creation”(or, if we use the popular term of Jean Baudrillard, creation of “simulacrums of simulation”). At this stage we have a kind of shift from “social” to “virtual” nature of human beings. This shift is enforced by expanding of Internet and modern (or postmodern) information and communication technologies. We could also call this knowledge “incomplete knowledge”, because in contemporary civilization future has a kind of ontological priority over the past and, even, over the present. The numerous literature on innovations and their crucial role in contemporary world helps to support this argument. And here we come to the necessity of creation of new paradigm of education, which would reflect these changes of nature of knowledge and human nature together with the other important attributes of nowadays reality (for example, the phenomenon of “overcoming the national” and “origin of the global” is specially interesting for me). I want to identify the main features of this new paradigm of education in my presentation. Keywords: knowledge, post-industrial society, new paradigm of education. 1 INTRODUCTION Knowledge is a kind of essential attribute of human being. Even our biological identification, homo sapiens, reflects this fact. In Ancient Greece the aphorism “Know Thyself”(“Gnothi Seauton”) from The Temple of Apollo at Delphi became a kind of philosophical motto and was used by Chilon of Sparta, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Thales of Miletus, Solon and Socrates. The intention to know and the origin of knowledge (as a knowing of good and evil) is the start point of human history according to Christian tradition. Human being always wants to know something, but the content or, maybe, paradigm of this knowledge depends on time, historical content, cultural context. If we take the development of European civilization in a linear perspective, we would see that intention to know Absolute in the Middle Ages dramatically differs from the intention to know the main laws of nature at the beginning of New Times. Does it mean that phenomenological structure of “pure knowledge” changed or this is only the issue of the object of knowledge? What is the comparative role of human intellect, intuition, mystical feelings in the paradigms of knowledge in different historical epochs? Why human being has this eternal intention – to know? Perhaps all these questions are too much complicated, but at the same time they marks the certain field, in which the thought about knowledge in contemporary time could grow and we as the representatives of academic audience would benefit from (and inside) this process. Any theoretical construction is a kind of simplification, which is mentally acceptable for other people. Different historical epochs have different standards of what is more or less acceptable during this Proceedings of EDULEARN10 Conference. 5th-7th July 2010, Barcelona, Spain. ISBN:978-84-613-9386-2 004403