Education: social work and ethical project. The humanist-complex approach in conversation with St. Thomas Aquinas

Abstract

The beginning of the twenty-first century signified a series of unprecedented transformations in the different orders of existence. Particularly in the area of education, there appears to be a reality of multiple convergences that exceeds the specific glance of a typical schooling of certain versions of modern pedagogies. As the second decade of the third millennium progresses, the multidimensionality of social panorama that education faces has become clearer than ever, at least in four key problems presented in this article: politics is confronted with the transformation of power and political systems based on functional hierarchy due to a renewed role of civil participation to strengthen social movements; the invigorated force of the capital-centered economy (subjugation of capital) after the global financial crisis of 2008; the constitution of an “informational citizenship” defined as a new mode of being derived from cyber links, networks and the technologization of societies; and, for the Colombian case, the effective democratic infeasibility because of the war degradation, institutions and even, of the civic consciousness in the face of the public.

In this sense, the humanist understanding of education is not comprehended here in a generic way from either the ideal values of the metaphysical man (humanist-classical) or from absolute assumptions of rationalist anthropology (humanist-enlightenment), but rather from the relational and integrative capacity required by living, the human and nonhuman condition in front of the pressing challenges of the millennium. Thus, this approach to education called “Humanist complex” is defined from three categories (biocentrism, complexity and decoloniality) from which, a conversation with the great tenets of the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas is proposed, not only to corroborate its current validity, but also as an attempt to extend its comprehensive framework in front of a contemporary social science landscape.