Critical Thinking in the Midst of Change

TO EXPERIENCE CHANGE, INTERPRET IT AND MAKE A MARK ON IT MEANS TO BE CONTINUOUSLY OPEN TO GATHERING ITS SEEDS, EXPLAINS RECTOR GIANMARIO VERONA IN THE EDITORIAL THAT OPENS THE JULY ISSUE OF VIASARFATTI25

A hundred professors have returned to the classroom in recent days to learn coding, while another fifty have been using it and teaching it every day for a year. Forty new hirings (between assistants, associates, full professors and professors of practice), mostly international, between 2017 and 2018, have strengthened the faculty, including in fields new to Bocconi such as data science and political science. These are the key numbers of the evolutionary process that Bocconi is carrying out, an evolution essential to our continuing role as an engine of knowledge with an impact on this changing world.

Experiencing and interpreting change and, above all, being able to affect it means being constantly open to gathering the seeds of change and making them our own. To teach our students that work is changing, we must first of all change ourselves and the way we teach. To be unafraid of the impact that artificial intelligence will have on the world of work, and therefore on each of our lives, we must learn to understand it, just as in these years we are teaching machines to speak and recognize images.The goal of our efforts is to make our students' experience increasingly stimulating and consistent with the needs of a digital-age labor market that is rapidly evolving, full of opportunities but also risks that need to be assessed.

In order to govern the risks and not be intimidated by change, however, it is not enough to enable Generation Z (the "centennials") to use new codes that allow us to understand reality and its evolution. We must above all empower them, by giving them the tools of logic and critical thinking that are indispensable for orientation in the realm of information and knowledge. And this will be a further step in the evolutionary process that Bocconi is experiencing, starting on 29 October with the introduction of a course on critical thinking.

Because if it is true that mankind is evolving from homo sapiens into a homo deus, it is also true that we must learn to manage this evolution with a sense of responsibility.

by Gianmario Verona