The ‘Siliconization’ Process of Education in the 21st Century

It is a process that results in the loss of the essence of the meaning of the educational act.

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Víctor Caballero

The society of the 21st century has undergone an educational paradigm shift that obeys the construction of a new type of society that is entirely technological and dehumanised by the interest of capital. The gurus of this new type of prevailing pedagogy sell these technological products as if they had discovered the Holy Grail, but do we really know where we are heading? Can these infinite resources improve the educational task? If the answer is affirmative, what will happen to those citizens who cannot access these new educational prostheses?

A consequence of this could be the emergence of a new type of social taxonomy, for example, a “Homo Obsoletus” (the expression is from Mayos, from his book Homo obsoletus: Precariedad y desempoderamiento en la turboglobalización, 2021). If one is not competent within this model, some human beings could end up being excluded from this society. If our era is qualified as liquid, as Bauman has developed in his books, in constant change of structures and values with constant acceleration, perhaps it is not difficult to believe that this model of pedagogical innovation will transmute into another different one. Therefore, from these “improvements” in education, we cannot conclude with certainty how we will have to educate the new generations.

The consequences that these gaseous pedagogies, devoid of content and true knowledge, provoke alienate the “authentic-existence”, as Heidegger warned in his text Being and Time (the Spanish translation made by José Gaos is from 1951). It is a very perverse process of “siliconization” of education that imposes an “ethos [that] depends on a particular genealogy [and] stands as the main and ultimate planetary reference to be inspired by.”, as Sadin described to us in 2018.

The gurus of Silicon Valley, on the contrary, will enrol their children in private direct instruction schools, since, as creators of this “cognitive capitalism”, they know that authentic education “does not receive students to introduce them into the factory, it does not position them as future Makers, but it receives them only as students”, in the words of Larrosa Bondía (Esperando no se sabe qué: sobre el oficio de profesor, 2019). Unfortunately, this is what is happening in state education.

The constant acceleration of society, with a constantly changing technology, imposes a separation between “training” and “instruction” that they see as negative. The formation understood as assimilation of values and beliefs disappears as a school object, forming part of the private life of each student and only that which has a functional and immediate sense is considered valid and, therefore, an anti-humanist and individualistic pedagogy is defended.

The educational subject will only be socialised if we establish a series of relationships through telematic and audiovisual networks that will connect him with the world. From psychology, it is affirmed that these new social relationships can provoke several psychological pathologies. The most important one, in my opinion, does not appear in the DSM-V, the manual of mental diagnoses of Arango López. It is a “siliconization process” that produces the loss of the essence of the meaning of the educational act, constructing a new type of student servant of a “pedagogism”, ideology described in detail by Alberto Royo, at the service of capital.

This siliconization process of education, as theorised by Laurant de Sutter, constructs an ‘educational ethos’ that subjects the student to a form of ‘narcocapitalism’. Society is transformed into a ‘Prozakland’. The effects of this process of subjective reconstruction of the student will lead to a situation where, upon becoming citizens, they are led to believe in the fallacy of living in the best of all possible worlds.

Another danger that can be inferred from this is the transition from a knowledge society to an information society. However, does having more information mean possessing more knowledge? Evidently, with the constant and mutable information overload in this type of society, and the pedagogy that is derived from it, often banal and contradictory, we arrive at a paradox. We find ourselves less informed and with less knowledge than at any other point in history.

Frequently, the vast amount of information that we generate as a society results in an information intoxication, a phenomenon that specialists like Alfons Cornella term as ‘infoxication’. Stemming from this fact, technological advancements and the increase in available cognitive capital today make us more aware than ever that knowledge and culture require time. Consequently, society and the students of this new type of education are becoming increasingly ignorant and uncultured.

Finally, how can we rectify this situation for those of us who champion culture and knowledge? The question is confusing because altering the situation seems impossible, given that academia has sold itself to capital. The only feasible solution might be to undertake an individual process of ‘desiliconization of education’, where teaching staff who do not subscribe to the dogmas of faith pedagogists, reclaim their classrooms and foster critical and free thinking among their students.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons