Cultural formation and education in the context of capitalist social relations: education for what?

Abstract

This article, of a theoretical nature, presents a reflection about the emptying of formative and educational processes in the context of social relations, based on the Critical Theory of Society. The implications of the new labor relations imposed by the use of science and technology as productive forces and control mechanisms of human experience, the commodification of culture and the conversion of information into knowledge are analyzed. Taking the formation crisis as a parameter of an expression of the crisis of capitalist society, concepts such as culture, cultural industry, work and the individual are used to elucidate the factors that tend to promote the standardization of subjectivity, the impoverishment of the experience of thought and the degradation of subjects. It is understandable that when rationalization and instrumentalization, which are important from the point of view of production, infiltrate spheres that are, or should be, dedicated to the transmission of culture as an expression of all that humanity has produced, and consequently to individuation, as in the case of education, they weaken the process of critical reflection and thus strengthen pseudo-education.