Education and Carrier Under the Sign of Technology Society. A Contemporary Challenge Reviewed Through the Lens of Dimitrie Drăghicescu Thinking

Abstract

In the present study, we attempt to address the connection between education and technology by placing it under the umbrella of an old sociological question: that concerning the relationship between the individual and society. We would say that questioning this relationship is a topic of enduring and necessary relevance. This perspective was inspired by the reading of a lesser-known Romanian sociologist, more closely associated with the French academic sphere through the works he wrote in French. This is Dumitru Drăghicescu, a disciple of Durkheim and the first Romanian sociologist to obtain his doctorate in 1904 under the guidance of this illustrious father of sociology in Paris. In his book The Reality of the Spirit. Essays on Subjective Sociology, written in 1928 in French, we find the theme of the relationship between the individual and society, which Drăghicescu approaches in the spirit of the deterministic conception, which stipulates that the individual is shaped by the social group to which he belongs. An individual's consciousness can only be detected and understood as a result of their belonging to a group. Drăghicescu shows how, following a constraining process of formation, the individual is forced to limit and control their natural, primitive impulses, thus transforming from a natural man into a social man. But in this discussion, Drăghicescu introduces, at the end of a demonstration meant to show through what mechanisms and phenomena the transition from the natural individual to the social one occurred, under the pressure of social groups that became increasingly larger and more complex, a conceptual branch concerning the role and place of education and career in the context of the analysed theme. For Drăghicescu, the technological evolution of humanity, which he observed under the force of its increasingly accelerated dynamics at the beginning of the 20th century, when he was writing, paradoxically means a return to the natural man, to the primitive man, in the sense that the individual becomes increasingly overtaken by technology. This increasingly invades his existence, including his biological existence, affecting the prolonged process at the end of which man, through the coercion of the group, through the development of abstraction capacities and through the emergence of articulated language, manages to understand the world in which he lives, separating objective reality from subjective reality. The primitive man could not do this: his understanding of the world had a magical character, mixing the subjective with the objective against a background of an inability to go beyond predominantly sensory knowledge. The same thing happens with man who tends to become dependent on technology, Drăghicescu anticipates a century ago. The distinction between objective and subjective blurs once again: "As objective science develops and discovers the laws of nature, our technology makes us increasingly masters over the earth. To some extent, we can change the earth to suit our will. Then our inner world begins, in a different way, to penetrate the outer world, these two worlds progressively interpenetrate each other, and at the extreme end of our objective scientific development we join the primitive man by effectively realising his subjective irrational conceptions." This is a great intuition of Drăghicescu.

This reality of exponential technological development, the tendency of the contemporary individual to resort to increasingly complex, sophisticated, and penetrating tools to solve increasingly simple life issues, has major implications for education and traditional forms of learning, which require conscious, cumulative, disciplined effort in accumulation and deepening. Education, in the spirit of Drăghicescu's argument, is a process of stylised "suffering," and not the recourse to an automated and accessible response, questionable in terms of quality, intended to simplify and accelerate the formation process. Drăghicescu links education to the same individual-society binomial, showing that it also depends on the characteristics of the complex and large social group. To the extent that technology, especially in its form of AI or robots (already humanoid), tends to embed itself into the social fabric, taking over human tasks and establishing individualised connections with humans, it is evident that education will recalibrate according to the new type of social structure, which in the not-too-distant future could include AI entities as persons. This matter has direct implications for careers and the choices individuals will have. Career, as Drăghicescu shows, is also determined for the individual by the group to which they belong. Choosing a career is, in reality, more of an appearance: "A career is a social function that we perform in order to live, which we did not choose, as most of the time there is no way to choose it, which we did not create, because it preexisted, and which, anyway, surpasses the individual, escaping personal determinations, since the individual is determined by them." Current technological achievements, in terms of their infiltration into society, fully reflect this old observation by Drăghicescu, and place it in a global context, also anticipated by Drăghicescu, who considered that the future belongs to a type of political organisation generated by the economic and political integration of states. The discussion about education and career in relation to social reconfigurations generated by scientific and technical developments is apparently new; what is truly new, however, is the specificity of current technologies, ready to restore cognitive and physical traits of the human being, ready to take their place in various contexts. And, as Drăghicescu said, the social individual, with self-awareness, is the creation of the group, we can imagine that AI entities will also be able to form their own "social groups" through their connection in digital networks. From there to self-awareness, to their social becoming, would probably be just a step.

These aspects nowadays constitute an ongoing phenomenon, which provokes debates about the education system, its adaptation to new labour market requirements, the quality of learning and functional literacy, about the new social divides generated by access to knowledge, and especially to quality knowledge, which fosters critical thinking. To gather indications regarding these aspects, we resort, as empirical material for this study, to information and thematic analyses found in the Romanian press, with reference to both local and global realities. These sources may seem modest in comparison to the conceptual breadth of Drăghicescu's thinking, but we consider that the press, a kind of social thermometer, signals the most striking unfolding phenomena. Against the backdrop provided by Drăghicescu's warnings, we will attempt to selectively highlight the challenges, risks, dangers, limits, and contradictions and perplexity faced by the contemporary individual in relation to their educational and professional journey, as major instances of their engagement with social life.