HOW TO LEARN WHAT TO DO (AND WHEN) IN CASE YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO: THE CASE FOR NEO-SOPHISTIC ADULT EDUCATION

Professional adult education started with Protagoras - a sophist of the fifth century B.C. who was the first to earn his living by teaching adults as embodied beings for becoming successful, embedded in a democratic society. Protagoras is especially known for teaching "euboulia" (good judgment when enough knowledge is not available) and the catching and/or moulding of the "kairos" (the right time and measure in doing things). The sophistical teachings of Protagoras lost much appreciation with the rise of Plato's disembodied eternal truths and the demise of the Athenian democracy and became mostly unknown for centuries. But in our days when situated cognition (embodied and socio-culturally embedded cognition) has become the most researched form of cognition in the Cognitive Sciences, a lot of democratic societies are alive, and dealing with new ill-defined or ambiguous problems has rather become the rule than the exception in everyday life, the interest in sort of a sophistic adult education has been renewed.

It will be argued that for a neo-sophistic adult education in order to learn what to do (and when) in case you do not know what to do, while old Protagorean principles are still useful, pedagogical methods unknown to Protagoras - or even unconceivable for him due to the lack of modern technologies at his time - can enrich the possibilities of such neo-sophistical adult education.

The still useful Protagorean principles will be explained, Protagoras' original teaching methods will be shortly sketched, and some of the new pedagogical methods of today for such a neo-sophistic adult education will be described.

References:
[1] Mendelson, M. (2002). Many sides: A Protagorean approach to the theory, practice, and pedagogy of argument, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers
[2] Scholz, W.-U. (2014). Skills for cre-active problem solving, In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies EDULEARN14 (CD-ROM ISBN: 978-84-617-0557-3) Barcelona, (Spain) 7th-9th of July, 2014, (p. 4949-4959)