Rethinking Bildung in the Postdigital Condition: From Competence Thinking to Caring Practices

Recent educational reforms across Europe and the Nordic countries promote “21st-century skills” – the so-called 4Cs: creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration – as the key to innovation and competitiveness in higher education. While these agendas appear progressive, they are rooted in a competence-based and individualist conception of learning that risks reducing education to measurable performance indicators. This paper argues that such a framework represents a continuation of the Cartesian epistemology of representational knowledge and the instrumental logic of “learning outcomes,” leaving little room for the ethical, relational, and situated dimensions of learning and formation (Bildung).
Drawing on practice theory (Schatzki 2019, Rouse 2023, Pickering 2025) and the philosophy of care (Mol 2008), the paper proposes a reorientation of Bildung through a practice-based ontology and a care-oriented ethics. Within a practice-ontological framework, knowledge and learning are understood as forms of participation and accountability within shared practices rather than as individual possession or cognitive mastery. Normativity is immanent to practices – it concerns how we should go on together – and learning thus entails developing situated responsiveness to the evolving demands of concrete situations. Bildung in this sense is not adaptation to pre-given standards but the cultivation of discernment and judgment: the embodied sense of Wittgenstein’s “now I know how to go on.”
Reinterpreted through the lens of care, Bildung becomes a mode of engagement characterized by relational, material, and affective involvement in shared worlds. Following Mol’s (2008) notion of care as tinkering and Pickering’s (2025) conception of acting with the world, education is conceived as the cultivation of capacities for attunement, responsibility, and mutual dependence rather than the formation of the autonomous, knowing subject. This shift redefines democratic education: not as the transmission of civic knowledge or institutional procedures but as the ongoing cultivation of caring, accountable, and inclusive practices through which common worlds are enacted.
Finally, the paper situates this rethinking of Bildung within the postdigital condition (Buch et al. 2024), where digital infrastructures, algorithms, and sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim 2015) shape what futures are seen as desirable or possible. A care-based Bildung invites students and educators to critically engage with these imaginaries and to imagine alternative, more sustainable and relational futures. The paper concludes by outlining pedagogical strategies—such as speculative design, future workshops, and sociotechnical mapping—that can foster Bildung as democratic and caring world-making in higher education.
Buch, A., Lindberg, Y. & Cerratto Pargman, T. (Eds.) (2024). Framing Futures in Postdigital Education. Critical Concepts for Data-driven Practices. Springer.
Jasanoff, S. & Kim, S.-H. (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity. Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press.
Mol, A. (2008). The Logic of Care. Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. Routledge
Pickering, A. (2025). Acting with the World. Agency in the Anthropocene. Duke University Press.
Rouse, J. (2023). Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction. University of Chicago Press.
Schatzki, T.R. (2019). Social Change in a Material World. Routledge.