Philosophical approaches to smart education and smart cities

Abstract

The impact of technology affects the educational field in an extraordinary way. The effect of technology must be treated from the educational method itself as well as its horizon in the new paradigm of citizen in this smart environment. This work proposes a revision of the immediate future of education and citizenship, as determined by the exponential impact of technology, based on relevant issues of classic philosophy and specially along the history and didactic program of the Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic). The paper analyses firstly the perspective of the transformation of current education towards a smart education. This transition is determined by the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the reflection on the competences of the 21st century, as something intrinsically related to the issues of citizenship as well as smart cities; secondly, we review the strategic and methodological proposals in accordance with this transformation, based on the theory of generative learning and on computational and algorithmic thinking; thirdly, from the point of view of contents, we analyse the importance of digital skills and, as a fundamental element of these, programming skills. Our proposal is to recover and update the contents of the Trivium, as a renewing and revitalizing element of the methodology and contents of education in the 21st century. This proposal is based on the assumption of the epistemological unity of these disciplines and on the integral anthropological vision that supports them. Both ideas acquire special relevance in the current context marked by the impact of technology as a determining element of the medium (smart education), of the methodology (generative learning, computational thinking) and of the contents (digital skills and programming).