Speech by Metropolitan of Rostov and Novocherkassk Mercury at the teachers’ conference “Spiritual experience of generations in the digital educational space of the region”translated

“All-honorable fathers! Dear sisters of mercy! Dear participants and guests of the congress!

The title of our meeting today seems to connect two concepts that, at first glance, are almost opposite: “spiritual experience of generations” and “digital educational space.”

The first speaks of continuity, of what is passed on from person to person over decades and centuries. The second is about a world that changes almost every month. And it seems to me that it is precisely between these two speeds - the speed of human maturation and the speed of technological change - that today the main tension of the era and one of the most important problems of education arises.

We are used to saying: the world is changing. But today this is no longer enough, because the world is not just changing - it is changing faster than a person can understand what exactly happened to him. Just a few centuries ago, a person could live his entire life in almost the same technological era: the world of his father, his own world and the world of his son were similar in their main features. Today, between father and son there may be not one era, but several. The generation of my peers grew up in the world of television and landline telephones, then the Internet came...