Education, signs, and the history of ideas

Abstract

This interview/dialogue addresses an important issue of how educational semiotics is grounded in the history of ideas. The discussions concern the shared history of semiotics and liberal education; the modern university and its medieval antecedents; semiotic consciousness, the traces of which are found in both Christianity and Islam (and the hermeneutics of Abrahamic and mystical religions, in general); intercultural translation; the relationship between learning (conceptualized edusemiotically) and biosemiotics, and how our social understandings of learning determine and shape our basic relationship to the world. Touching on the concepts of scaffolding and evolution, the chapter discusses adaptation in relation to learning, social semiotics and contemporary social reality, while imploring us to consider education in terms of its service to learning (and not the other way around).