Undoubtedly, the role of the teacher has undergone a profound transformation from antiquity to today. Our times have propelled us through unprecedented revolutions of knowledge and information, and the real question that needs to be asked is how to prepare, how to design an education that prepares the world for unpredictable changes. My daughter Beatrice, who is 8 years old today, will be a 25-year-old enrolled perhaps in some academic institution in 2040. Already today, I face the question of what her preparation should be and what skills she will need to face the challenges of a world in a schizophrenic process of evolution, flooded by a quantity of knowledge and information available through sources that we cannot even imagine twenty years from now.

We will probably be equipped with subcutaneous chips capable of instilling predetermined notions in relation to the role we will have to (or that will be necessary) play in the community. This is not intended to be a dystopian vision but an astonished look at a future that we know less and less how to predict and on which it is necessary to reflect on the role of the teacher. What will then be the educational process that will span the next few years? What knowledge will have to be transmitted? What will be the raison d'être in the spirit of those who teach if we are increasingly emptied (or rather flooded) with content from sources of questionable reliability? Should we perhaps be plastic and discern the sources and forms rather than the knowledge? In ancient times, the need to learn knowledge was a way to achieve virtue.

The paideia represented the educational reference where the relationship between teacher and student was much more than asymmetrical. The emphasis was placed on the transmission of knowledge that was objectively unavailable and not within everyone's reach. Teaching had a precise transmissive function with a beginning and an end. I don't know - I learn - I know The educational function, in addition to having a transmissive purpose in itself, also represented a good practice to reach that virtue that led the individual towards a better social condition. Someone, however, already in ancient times, proposed a method of research and not of transmission of information.

A constant search. A recursive rethinking through dialogue of a truth that was never absolute. I believe it was Socrates himself who was the true precursor of the current symmetrical educational models: no one is the repository of truth, much less the teacher, the master who is always searching and finds no peace. It is through dialogue, comparison, continuous remodulation and interaction that a method progresses, not to the detriment of the capitalization of knowledge but in a perspective that must make one aware of the unpredictability of the future and of what will be necessary for Beatrice so that she can serenely place herself in the social dimension. The emergence of spiritual leaders has always sprouted in the moments of history that have outlined profound spiritual crises. Christianity itself has shifted the center of gravity of the search towards an inner teacher. Towards a virtue that was no longer to be transmitted but to be sought. Deep spiritual crises that preceded economic and political crises.

Today, crises are situated, distributed and embodied, parallel to the distributed and embodied vision of knowledge. A vision that has clearly demarcated the educational method and the role of the teacher. When in classical theories the interoperability between science and psychology focused the attention of the community on experimental methods increasingly oriented towards the study of the mind, nationalisms emerged and the homologation of learners was as radical as the dissemination of the mos maiorum in the times of ancient Rome. The role of the teacher in behaviorism included sequences from simple to complex through stimuli and responses, rewards and penalties. A central, unavoidable role, where the transmission of information and the successful transmission was the goal of the educational action.

Is the smartphone our Pavlov? Isn't FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) the same as the salivary production of the animal? That animal that pressed a red button because it was educated to that reaction through a stimulus. Today we press on icons instead of red buttons. The fear of "being left out" is a much fiercer stimulus than hunger itself. A social and not biological hunger. The cognitivist model then takes the path of the study of the mind and the center of gravity shifts to the organism (Stimulus - Organism - Response), giving justice to those processing capabilities that distinguish us from the world of red buttons. The perceptual stimulation then passes to an elaboration and translation into symbols that enter the drawers of memory and those responses are elaborated that are no longer just primordial needs. The teacher must calibrate the information so that it is not too much or too little.

An increasing complexity generates that "ascensional" dimension of knowledge that leads the individual to fulfillment. The same realization of the ancient virtue but today scientifically calibrated with massive doses of input. The problem of representations as "concepts" that form the units of memory is introduced and addressed, and the organization is mostly linguistic. But if learning is understanding, the role of the teacher is, once again, that of a "knowledge dispenser". Educational programs based on the accumulation of notions. In the past, this methodology made sense, as information was scarce, and even the information that slowly managed to filter into society was continuously blocked by censorship. Today we have a reverse censorship as the flood of information produces the compression of bubbles of thought that prevent progress or rather, progress in a direction traced by others. In such a situation, the last thing a teacher should do is give learners more information! They need critical tools to interpret information, to distinguish what is important from what is irrelevant, and above all to be able to frame all information in a broader social scenario.

But teachers have engaged in inserting data into the heads of their students while simultaneously pushing them towards critical thinking. For fear of authoritarianism, liberal schools have avoided the consolidated historical narrative, believing that a high dose of knowledge and a parallel freedom of thought would induce students to form an idea of the world. But information is already bio-available; what is really lacking is a critical capacity to adapt to the context without it becoming homologation to the context itself. The current teacher will condition the future of life because the learning society will be able to make choices based on how much it will be able to evaluate and not on the basis of the amount of information it possesses. From the meta-reflexive theories onwards, the need emerges to frame the role of the teacher as that of a mediator, a maître who prepares the room for learning and does not provide menus, but opens the kitchen and invites guests to cook the courses of knowledge. An adaptive knowledge, of courses that take on different aromas and flavors depending on the spices that each one doses and prefers. The evaluation is not the goodness of the dish but the cooperation in the preparation of it.

The dialogical aspect assumes more and more relevance as well as in parallel the neurosciences provide more and more precise feedback on learning abilities. The focus is no longer information but context, culture. The focus is, likewise, the in-depth study of cognitive processes and the correlation between mind and environment.

Today, the teacher must build scaffolding and support the learner in a continuous relationship of co-construction of knowledge. He must intervene on request and constantly question himself until he arrives at the remodulation of learning environments through a design that involves the students themselves. The most important of these scaffoldings will be the ability to manage change, to learn new things and to be able to actively contribute to the social educational process. I argue this because, working in the field of artificial intelligence-based technologies, I have had the opportunity to see an excerpt of the hyperbole that will guide development in the coming years. What was a chatbot just 5 years ago is now an automaton capable of writing a reflection like this autonomously on the basis of little input information and without any active reinforcement except a like or 5 stars in a review. We are already totally absorbed in a world of algorithms that control and guide every single aspect of existence. What we certainly don't need is a teacher-algorithm that predetermines our behavior and knowledge. We need a teacher who is a new Socrates. "Souls, in order to be pregnant, must first mate with other souls." And it is precisely the art of giving birth that triggers the path of searching for the truth where Socrates moves quietly and the learner does not know he is one. In reality, Socrates himself learns from the buzz he had generated by exaggerating in challenging the judges with the proposal of being maintained at the expense of the community in the Prytaneum.

At this point, I face the thesis of maieutics in interpreting the meaning of the relationship between teacher and learner and I ask myself "how important is the making of the unborn child compared to the pregnancy?" and "how much does pregnancy bring one closer to (Aristotelian) happiness?", the ultimate goal of man.

And it is precisely pregnancy, declined as a path between conception and birth, that leads me to identify a context not only relegated to a functional action of knowledge transmission, but one that involves the entire being of teachers and learners in their respective roles that are continually exchanged in a circular process. To give a final meaning to this reflection, I would like the role of the teacher to be read transversally, outside of its function and its purpose, understanding the situation (understood as being situated) in an uncertain social context apparently regulated by undefined variables. I do not believe that an educational activity can be conceived that does not involve teachers and, even more so, such an activity that does not involve learners is inconceivable. I also think that the distancing from the classical asymmetric logics of conception of the role, to reach the contextual-cultural-constructivist methods and land on the experimental methods, have a reasonable correspondence to an evolution of thought from cognitive to relational. In fact, the educational environment is society itself that predisposes situations more or less adequate for development but within which the act of teaching is often focused more than the role of those who teach, who live and act in the same society as those who learn. The post-cognitivist currents focus on the role of learners, reversing the asymmetry of classical models but not being able to ignore the guiding role of teachers. It is very difficult, indeed almost impossible, for a student to learn and grow without the help of a guide. A learner needs help when he encounters difficulties in understanding correctly, thinking logically and acting socially. Whether knowledge is distributed, embodied or positioned, one cannot evade the role of the teacher. Equally, one cannot evade the role of the learner in a transmissive relationship that would otherwise be reflexive.

On the other hand, if we understand the environment as a didactic meta-structure under which the roles of teacher and learner are constantly exchanged and if we do not crystallize the role of the teacher under the guise of the function he performs, i.e. teaching, what we really need to investigate is the social formative dimension in which the person who is at the same time a teacher-learner is placed.

The thought of the individual in the organismic theses and the recovery of individuality in the adaptive theses reposition the axis asymmetrically because it again frees the teacher from the training responsibility in the strict sense and makes the role of the learner active in the destruction and reconstruction of training environments. Despite the fact that Piaget's constructivist thesis from which derives the fact that knowledge is a social product and that it therefore arises through the interaction between actors and tools is foundational, in my opinion the key to interpretation, in these models, still lies in the action of teaching and not of the teacher-person placed in the context. In fact, the promotion of knowledge structures capable of dealing with complex problems proposed by society is still an action (which arises from the intention to transmit these structures) and is concretized in an end (when the structures are transmitted). In evolutionary biology, regardless of whether we are talking about innatism or epigenesis, the effect of learned behavior on evolution seems to further distance Piaget's circular view of learning, placing it on a spectrum of interpretation that is exclusively evolutionary. But if the individuals best adapted to the environment through assimilation and accommodation survive longer and, by reproducing, give rise to a lineage in which their individual mode of adaptation is preserved, is it not perhaps that the origin of social structures lies precisely at the basis of a progressive and genetic accommodation of man?