The dark side of education: its role in the formation of values, spirituality and ideology

Abstract

Traditional educational processes have focused on the acquisition of contents by the students. Universal formative areas such as ideology, values and spirituality are considered as desirable assumptions in educational systems; however, it is not possible to stop reflecting on their importance and transcendence in the formation of human beings nowadays, joined to the crisis of modern rationality and the emergence of new educational alternatives that respond to the complex current contexts. An incidence space of these factors is constituted by the so-called hidden “curriculum”, and one of the spaces by which it is possible to acquire, train and develop these educational fields is the symbol.

From a reflection on these factors, their general characteristics and their presence in the Ecuadorian educational context, the importance of the hidden curriculum will be studied as well as the symbol, as an area of human rationality that evidences a universal trait in relation to the development of humanity.

This research is expository and hermeneutic, being a necessary tool for the comprehension of the symbol as an educational factor, which presents in the discursive development of the proposal.