Developments in information and communication technologies over the past century have driven social and political changes and shaped nearly every aspect of the world. Education has been considered to be particularly open to these technological changes.
For example, radio and television were hailed as new ways to change the medium of learning. However, the educational benefits of these media are still not properly utilized in in-school or out-of-school learning systems today. What can we say about the advent of computers, the Internet, digital systems, social networks, and now the disruption of generative artificial intelligence?
What we are seeing now is new “parallel schools” emerging in our society that compete with the traditional school system, even if they do not necessarily intend to do so.
These new media and information systems, digital or otherwise, develop conditioning through vocabularies, conceptual categories, and attitudes. Programs generate norms, values, and ideological content, whether explicit or implicit. These tend to be associated with dominant cultural and economic models because they participate in structures of social power.
Ultimately, it has the potential to bring about lasting changes to our current social model.
education system is lacking
Images and sounds captivate our passivity. These privacy-invasive media have sparked important technological advances that have changed our social behavior and habits, for better or worse, so that whatever happens in the world instantly reaches our eyes, hearts, and brains. Not everyone is unaware of this. world.
This was accompanied by a crisis of loneliness in cutting-edge society, carried deep into our private lives.
Humans tend to adapt to the dictatorship of the media.
However, despite their huge impact, these media are not integrated into the formal education system. Its pedagogical potential is not exploited and it remains only a decorative learning medium in the majority of schools around the world. This parallel school, like the internet and all digital and audiovisual media, is inadvertently allowed to build, not only enforcing appropriate behavior but also encouraging violence, discrimination, and superficial physical attractiveness. , an irreverent narcissism, one that glorifies and reinforces the desire for accumulation. The importance of material things over spiritual things.
A new school that ignores minorities and puts at great risk our world's greatest wealth: its unique cultural diversity, which is the axis of freedom, creativity, change, and progress. All this happens without taking into account how fiction and reality are increasingly merging on screen.
These sophisticated vehicles fire off all sorts of lasting stimuli that transcend content and continents and compete with versatility and neurocentric plasticity that traditional schools cannot provide.
We are faced with electronic and digital developments that have revolutionized distance, time, space, and the dissemination of information. Being unready for change, humans tend to adapt to the dictatorship of media and instruments rather than modifying the behavioral patterns imposed by them in order to obtain appropriate and fair benefits from them.
traces of society
Schools should teach students to reflect on media messages in scientific, humanistic, and aesthetic ways. This is the new reality that the times demand in all times of change. Schools must break away from their role of solely informing and promoting memory activities. Educational reform is a permanent activity of society, not a legal manual.
Schools should teach scientific, humanistic, and aesthetic considerations about media messages.
A true educational law is one whose only provision mandates constant change in order to keep pace with the rapid flow of social, economic, scientific, and cultural progress. . Only in this way can training and information be integrated in tandem, avoiding parallel schools. Education as a social imprint will acquire its anticipatory potential. It will make it possible to form a human being who can understand, adapt to and transform the fast-paced world of the time.
This proactive education requires a new dimension to the learning process. For the legendary Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the best physics student is not the one who knows and memorizes the formulas best, but the one who understands why the formulas exist.
I would add that the best philosophy students are not the ones who can lecture on Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, but the ones who think critically about all of them, and even take the risk of thinking for themselves. Schools of the future will have to take this risk if they want to leverage technological means rather than being dominated by them.
This content is part of a collaboration agreement between “WorldCrunch” and the magazine “Ethic”. Read the original article at this link.
