Renaissance Learning for Guided Lifeworld Education: Archipelagoes in the Age of AI

Abstract

This literature review examines the theoretical foundations for a model in which programs and initiatives function not as siloed hierarchies but as archipelagoes. These distinct islands of knowledge are connected by navigable crossings that students must learn to chart for themselves. Drawing on Michel de Montaigne’s essayistic inquiry (Que sais-je?), Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), and Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, the review synthesizes existing scholarship on interdisciplinary education, Renaissance humanism, and experiential learning to argue that the dominant organizational logic of the modern school actively could be reformulated. The archipelago model proposed here offers a structural alternative suited to an era in which artificial intelligence can replicate pieces of knowledge but cannot replicate the crossings between lifeworlds that constitute genuine education.

1. Introduction: The Question That Founds a Lab

The Montaigne Academy is a lab established in 2026 for the advancement of Renaissance-type human-infused learning in the age of AI. The lab takes its name and its research approach to education from the essays of Michel de Montaigne. His question, What do I know? (Que sais-je?) is the lab’s eternal question.

This review situates the lab’s founding ideals within three converging literatures: the Renaissance humanist tradition of integrated learning; the phenomenological concept of the lifeworld as the ground of all meaningful education; and the philosophy of the archipelago as a model for knowledge structures that resist continental totality. The central proposition is that programs and initiatives, conceived as islands in an archipelago, become engines of on-campus culture rather than administrative layers directed towards specialization.

2. Renaissance Learning Revisited: The Essayistic Tradition

The Renaissance ideal of the uomo universale has been extensively documented in the history of education (Grafton & Jardine, 1986; Grendler, 2002), yet its recovery in contemporary schooling has been largely cosmetic. What distinguished Renaissance pedagogy was not breadth for its own sake but the assumption that knowledge is incomplete until it has been passed through the medium of personal experience and articulated in one’s own voice. Montaigne’s Essais remains the paradigmatic expression of this principle: each essay begins is hosted by an erudite narrator. Recent educational scholarship has returned to the essay form as a site of resistance to the standardization of student writing. Menary (2007) argues that extended writing is itself a cognitive process

3. The Lifeworld as Educational Ground

Husserl’s concept of the Lebenswelt serves as the pre-theoretical horizon of lived experience upon which all scientific abstraction ultimately depends. In educational theory, the concept has been most productively developed by van Manen (1990, 2014), who argues that pedagogical understanding must begin with a phenomenological description of the student’s actual experience; not with curricula designed in advance of encounter. Friesen (2012) extends this into digital contexts, demonstrating that even technologically mediated learning environments remain grounded in bodily, temporal, and intersubjective structures that resist algorithmic reduction. To enforce a seminar approach would encourage a reversal of the standard lecture. In fact, the seminar sequence is consistent with Dall’Alba’s (2009) argument that professional and intellectual formation requires an ontological turn—a shift from knowledge acquisition to the transformation of the knower’s way of being in the world.

4. AI and the Case for Archipelagoes

Édouard Glissant’s Traité du Tout-Monde (1997) and Poétique de la Relation (1990) offer a spatial and philosophical vocabulary for thinking about knowledge structures that neither dissolve into undifferentiated totality nor harden into isolated enclosures. The archipelago, for Glissant, is the figure of a world in which each island retains its opacity while remaining in constitutive relation with other islands across open water. The crossing, not the territory, is the unit of meaning.

Applied to program design, the archipelago model inverts the logic of administrative hierarchy. Knowledge is classified and framed; students move between departments as tourists move between nation-states, showing passports and following prescribed itineraries. The archipelagic alternative treats each discipline as an island with its own topography, climate, and intellectual ecology. It also includes crossings that connect each island. A student’s formation consists not in mastering any single island but in learning to navigate the passages between them: the shallow straits between history and literature, the deep channels between mathematics and philosophy, the unpredictable currents between science and ethics.

The emergence of large language models capable of producing competent disciplinary prose has intensified the urgency of the archipelagic turn. If AI can generate a passable essay, a lab project report, and an analysis for a business competition, then the educational value of producing such artefacts within a single program or initiative approaches zero. What AI cannot replicate is the crossing: the moment in which a student, moving between islands, encounters a conceptual friction that no single discipline can resolve and must improvise a path of their own. Selwyn (2022) and Holmes et al. (2019) have argued that the educational response to AI must not be defensive prohibition but structural reimagination of what learning is for. The lab’s position is that a refocus of education on the distinctively human capacity for lifeworld navigation is most important. 

5. Conclusion: Que sais-je?

The lab’s founding question (Que sais-je?) is not a confession of ignorance but a methodological commitment to the perpetual examination of what one thinks one knows. This review has argued that the question, when taken seriously as a design principle, generates a curriculum in which program and initiative function as archipelagoes: disciplinarily distinct, relationally constituted, and navigable only through the kind of embodied, essayistic inquiry that Montaigne himself practiced. The convergence of Renaissance humanism, Husserlian phenomenology, and Glissantian poetics provides a robust theoretical foundation for an educational model that is neither nostalgic nor utopian but structurally responsive to the conditions of the present: What do I know? has never been more difficult, or more necessary, to answer honestly.

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