Educating against the automated world : Alexis Carrel’s and Aldous Huxley’s pedagogical Rrcipes

Around the middle of the 20th century, a debate arose about the kind of education that should be given to children and young people to prepare them for the challenges of a technologically advanced world. The proposals went in two different directions. Some proposed reforms of the school system to favor the integration of citizens into the automated world, while others considered it a priority to prepare citizens to protect themselves from the dangers of these new technologies. In this essay, after having briefly outlined the history of automation and artificial intelligence, and the meaning of these two concepts, we deal with two education theorists who have embarked on the second path, Alexis Carrel and Aldous Huxley. Although united by a technosceptical orientation, the two scholars nonetheless propose different pedagogical recipes. This is partly due to the different disciplinary backgrounds of the two scholars and to their different political beliefs. Both think that the world is going in the wrong direction, but while Carrel seems to envision an authoritarian solution, Huxley espouses anarchism and self-education.