Education and Training: Progress or Conceptual Drift? [Drop 0.1]

Massimo Bellagente

3 min read

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May 20, 2026

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A reflective inquiry into the gradual loss of cognitive depth in contemporary educational culture.

For the sake of clarity, I should begin with a transparent admission: I am a retired professional reflecting on a field to which I dedicated much of my working life. I do not consider myself particularly polemical, yet this reflection inevitably contains a critical dimension — not directed toward individuals, but toward a broader tendency that appears increasingly visible across educational and training contexts.

Having stepped outside the professional system, I now find myself in the somewhat privileged position of observing the world of education and training from a greater distance, with fewer institutional constraints and perhaps with a wider temporal perspective.

Throughout my career, I worked as a teacher, psychologist in the field of education and training, and consultant for educational publishing. Across these different roles, one central theme consistently emerged: the processes through which knowledge is constructed, organized, and transmitted.

With some regret, I must acknowledge that over the decades I have not witnessed a clear evolution in these domains. More often, I have observed forms of conceptual stagnation and, in certain respects, even regression.

What some philosophers once described as the “spirit of the age” appears, at times, to have weakened within contemporary educational culture.

In particular, I have observed a gradual fading of the intellectual momentum once generated by Cognitive Psychology and, more broadly, by the cognitive sciences tradition. At the same time, educational discourse has increasingly gravitated toward more reductionist explanatory frameworks, often influenced by highly specialized interpretations of Cognitive Neuroscience.

This is not a rejection of neuroscience itself, whose contributions remain essential, but rather a concern about the risk of reducing learning processes to simplified biological explanations while neglecting the broader cognitive, symbolic, interpretative, and cultural dimensions of knowledge construction.

When I read contemporary discussions on adult learning — and even more so those concerning formal schooling — I often have the impression that an important opportunity has remained only partially realized: the opportunity to integrate more fully the extraordinary theoretical and methodological richness developed throughout twentieth-century human sciences.

Instead, educational discourse has sometimes favored simplified procedural solutions, highly marketable frameworks, or rapidly shifting academic trends whose lifespan often resembles that of seasonal intellectual fashions.

Yet beneath the surface of contemporary educational rhetoric there exists, in my view, a vast reservoir of what might be called hidden evidence: cognitive insights, experimental findings, interpretative models, and methodological intuitions that remain confined within specialized research environments or fragmented disciplinary traditions, rarely reaching everyday educational practice in meaningful ways.

These articles emerge precisely from the conviction that many of these neglected perspectives still possess considerable explanatory and practical value — and that they deserve renewed attention within educational, academic, and training contexts.

The purpose of this series is therefore not to propose definitive solutions, but to reopen a dialogue around cognitive depth, knowledge construction, and the epistemological foundations of learning itself.

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