On the technocentric model of self-education
“The technocratic paradigm of education that has come to be formed also transforms strategies of self-education, giving them an explicitly expressed pragmatic orientation. The social role of self-education changes, and the resulting level of education is now linked directly to self-realization in labor, to the practical application of knowledge in the professional sphere. It is in this period that professional self-education comes to be formed as a separate kind of activity.
The development of science and education in an industrial society leads to the increasing complexity of knowledge and the ways and means by which it is transmitted. The emergence of the technoenvironment imposes new demands on self-education activity, constituting an indicator of the individual’s mastery of advanced technologies and the optimality of his involvement in the information space.
Society is in need of new models of knowledgeability, requiring self-education activity of a clearly explicit technocentric type, which, as time goes on, takes the place of the culturocentric self-education technologies of antiquity.
The technocentric orientation of self-education came into being in response to society’s need to develop production, science, and technology; it is linked to the formation of the information space as a separate sphere and entails the individual’s inclusion in the technogenic environment, at the expense of his development as an individual, his sociocultural identity, and the character of his interactions with the social environment.
But at the same time the technocentric model of self-education is a means by which the individual can adapt to the dynamics of the developing world; it answers his existential needs of survival and reproduces the type of personality who will be able to adapt himself to the new social conditions” (p. 67).
Reference:
Shuklina, E. A. (2001). Technologies of self-education. Russian Education and Society, 43(2), 57-78.