Digitalization of Education: Challenges to Traditional Norms and Moral Principles

Abstract

Indigitalization of all sides of society, including education, is evidence of the commencement of digital reality. However, the significance of the society transformation, due to the newest technologies power, is of a special kind: its effectiveness in the field of education determines to a great extent the pace and quality of digitalization of the modern world. Most experts present stunning and fascinating prospects of digitalization of all aspects of human life in their scientific research and forecasts whereas its risks and negative consequences are presented to a lesser extent. They might be represented in the possible dehumanization and instrumentalization of education, in the deformation of a person’s identity that might disintegrate into fragments and even reduce to a “digital person”. It might be the devaluation of traditional moral norms and principles leading to the destruction of the moral foundations of society, which in the public consciousness have always been associated with strength and inviolability of fundamentals, which are rooted in being together and consciously upheld. Hence, it is extremely relevant to study the problem of how digitalization changes human relations, the essence of which is based on morality and ethics. The author of the proposed article believes that a fruitful solution to this problem is in its new turn. This turn indicates the prospect of identifying and preserving the constructive possibilities in transforming education. Those are the possibilities of optimal and harmonious interfacing of digital and humanitarian technologies that ensure a person’s moral identity, his ability to be different while keeping his self-identity, which means completeness and integrity of his Self. The entire university community should be concerned about the formation of a student as a moral personality; it should be the concern of the “joint responsibility”. Ethical self-understanding crystallizes out in the communicative action and in the structures of the life-world.