Deep Learning and Education in the 21st Century. The Challenge of Medieval Literature for Us Today

In the face of radical changes in technology, the availability of ever-growing AI programs, the decline of students’ study-habits and of the general observance of fundamental principles in education at large, it is high time to reflect on what education really means and how we could deepen it again to make it meaningful also for the current generation gravely challenged by the onslaught of the computer world. This paper does not intend to offer a global review of world literature, or of the Humanities at large, which would be impossible here at any rate. Instead, my challenge consists of reintroducing seemingly very remote and presumably irrelevant medieval European literature and to probe how at least some select samples might help us to return to the notion of deep reading and hence to recenter the Humanities within the wider academic context. The argument focuses on experiences I have made over decades of teaching at the university level that have illuminated for me the timeless needs of the younger generation to be exposed to existential issues, values, ideals, morality, and philosophy from the past as future pilot lights in their own lives. The central argument underscores the enormous potential of pre-modern literature for contemporary and future explorations of the true meaning of human life especially because it requires from us to engage in a deep reading, focusing carefully on every word, sentence, and all structural elements because they carry throughout symbolic or moral, allegorical, and often even anagogical meaning.