Root Metaphors of Education: Validation, Credentialism, and Digital Intelligence as an Emerging Hypothesis

Abstract This article develops a critical genealogy of three historically significant educational metaphors–literacy, schooling, and credentialism–in order to examine how different regimes of validation have organized the public recognition of learning, competence, and educational belonging. Drawing on Stephen C. Pepper, the root metaphor is understood as a matrix of intelligibility; through Ivan Illich, this notion is shifted to the historical-institutional plane, where tools, documents, schools, and credentials structure forms of authority and dependence. The article argues that literacy linked legitimate knowledge to written culture, schooling associated recognized learning with institutional trajectories, and credentialism condensed educational trajectories into diplomas, certificates, and qualifications. It then analyzes the contemporary fissure of this regime in light of micro-credentials, verifiable digital credentials, recognition of prior learning, and digital infrastructures of validation. In this context, digital intelligence is examined as a candidate for a new root metaphor. The article concludes that its philosophical-educational challenge is not merely technical, but normative and democratic.