Reconstructing a Learning Society. The Ideal of Self-cultivation and Dewey’s Principle of Continuity

What is a learning society? The idea that learning must become central for every social agent, throughout life and in every domain has aroused a great interest among scholars and public institutions. Since the late 1960s, it has been subject of a conceptual opposition between humanistic utopias of personal self-cultivation and managerial ideologies of individual adaptation. Beyond this opposition, John Dewey’s principle of educational continuity allows an original reconstruction of this idea.