Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2025 number 4

Introduction. An attempt is made to carry out a radical critical analysis of the transformation of the educational process in the context of the dictatorship of capitalist rationality. The starting point of the study is the conviction that education in its historical and philosophical sense is not simply a set of institutional procedures or the transfer of knowledge, but a complex and internally contradictory process of becoming a subject through self-knowledge, labor, alienation and recognition, which in the Hegelian tradition is designated by the concept of Bildung. In the context of the neoliberal economic system, this essence of education is systematically displaced, replaced by the utilitarian goals of training market operators. The methodology of the study is based on Hegelian dialectics, which allows us to consider the contradictions of education not as side effects, but as symptomatic expressions of the deep logic of alienation of the spirit from itself. Through the prism of the dialectic of master and slave, the current situation is analyzed, in which metrics, KPI and standardized forms of control are becoming a new “master” impersonal but omnipotent. The essence of the discussion revolves around the structural substitution of rational, speculative thinking (Vernunft) with rational, operational rationality (Verstand), subordinated to the requirements of efficiency and measurability. Digital platforms, interactive interfaces and gamified educational environments, instead of being a means of expanding the horizons of thinking, become instruments of disciplinary control and reproduction of capitalist norms. Education loses its ontological horizon of being a space for the formation of a subject capable of transcendence, denial and freedom. The conclusion of the article emphasizes that the modern education system is not just a mirror of capitalism, but its active instrument: it is not neutral, but normative, and as such it participates in the production of a new type of subjectivity - fragmented, adapted, functional, but critically helpless. The way out of this trap is possible only through philosophical reflection, through a return to the dialectical logic of thinking, as a space in which not only knowledge, but also freedom becomes possible.