The age of advanced technologies (industry 4.0, robots, sophisticated machines able to replace human workers) has already arrived. We cannot stop to debate on the ethical demands for a human sustainability of this technological progress, and for sure we must ask ourselves if education is already providing tools to manage this epochal transition. Education seems having been too contents-oriented over the last fifty years. Contents is what really matters and what we must achieve: form is considered a sort of plus, related to people’s freedom. This slow and inexorable passage to contents centered institutional education, has had a visible consequence: the aesthetical question of the form has turned into the main requisite of a culture based only on consuming. So the argument is still relevant: will education be able to give an aesthetic perception of the self and of the world around? When we talk of aesthetic awareness we mean that particular consciousness linked to imagination. This contribution aims to use contemporary philosophical issues on aesthetic (theories by Herbert Marcuse, Arnold Gehlen, Peter Sloterdijk) to affirm the role of imagination as a necessary framework for any technological education.

Moral TechEducation: The Role of Imagination to Humanize Technological Societies

Fabrizia Abbate
2020-01-01

Abstract

The age of advanced technologies (industry 4.0, robots, sophisticated machines able to replace human workers) has already arrived. We cannot stop to debate on the ethical demands for a human sustainability of this technological progress, and for sure we must ask ourselves if education is already providing tools to manage this epochal transition. Education seems having been too contents-oriented over the last fifty years. Contents is what really matters and what we must achieve: form is considered a sort of plus, related to people’s freedom. This slow and inexorable passage to contents centered institutional education, has had a visible consequence: the aesthetical question of the form has turned into the main requisite of a culture based only on consuming. So the argument is still relevant: will education be able to give an aesthetic perception of the self and of the world around? When we talk of aesthetic awareness we mean that particular consciousness linked to imagination. This contribution aims to use contemporary philosophical issues on aesthetic (theories by Herbert Marcuse, Arnold Gehlen, Peter Sloterdijk) to affirm the role of imagination as a necessary framework for any technological education.
2020
ISSN 2435-9467
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11695/97862
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