Education in the conditions of digital culture: a value analysis

Abstract

Digital culture as a significant social phenomenon of recent decades radically transforms communicative practices, mechanisms of knowledge production and recording, as well as the deep value foundations of education, which has historically been oriented toward transmitting cultural experience through the authority of the teacher, the linearity of the text, and institutional closure, replacing these with a networked, decentralized architecture open to multiple interpretations. This generates an axiological challenge affecting all levels of the educational system. The digital environment, which is not value-neutral, actively promotes priorities of speed, accessibility, individualization, and visuality that conflict with traditional pedagogical values of systematicity, critical thinking, dialogicity, and depth. This is manifested in everyday practice as competition between the teacher and digital platforms for students’ attention, the substitution of substantive quality criteria with instrumental metrics of coverage, engagement, and conversion, and the reduction of education to the utilitarian function of ensuring competitiveness in the labor market, even as spaces open for self-organization, creativity, and intercultural dialogue. Philosophical-pedagogical reflection reveals how the blurring of the teacher’s function as a bearer of values and a model for relating to the world in favor of algorithmic recommendations and anonymous communities complicates the formation of personal value self-determination. This makes it necessary to expand digital literacy by incorporating an axiological dimension oriented toward reflexive assessment of content not only according to criteria of reliability but also according to the character of the values it transmits, under conditions of fluidity, fragmentation, and contextuality of knowledge that require reorienting education away from the accumulation of information toward the capacity for comprehension and productive critical analysis. Analysis of value hierarchies demonstrates pronounced polarization in the transition from traditional to digital formats, with the greatest decline in the importance of the upbringing function, interpersonal interaction, depth of knowledge, and systematicity, accompanied by an increased role for information accessibility, individual learning pace, and autonomy. These shifts are nonlinear in character, varying between teachers and students according to length of service, age, and disciplinary profile, with humanities education oriented toward interpretation, dialogue, and work with value-laden texts proving more vulnerable than technical fields, where issues of professional ethics and responsibility come to the fore. The value conflicts identified in pedagogical practice – including dilemmas of surface-level assimilation versus breadth of coverage, loss of personal contact versus audience expansion, plagiarism and compilation versus source accessibility, reduced motivation to read versus multimodality, device dependence versus technological literacy, formalization of assessment versus objectivity, and commercialization versus democratization of access – reflect the acuity of everyday professional difficulties and the fundamental tension between extensive and intensive approaches to teaching and learning. Factors preserving the axiological integrity of education in the digital age form a hierarchy in which the teacher’s personality as a bearer of values and the retention of in-person interaction formats ensuring corporeality, co-presence, and immediacy of contact occupy the leading position. These are supplemented by the humanities content of curricula, reflective practices, the integration of digital ethics as a discipline, and an interdisciplinary approach. Student assessments confirm that even representatives of the digital generation recognize a deficit in value and belief formation, qualitative understanding of material, and communication with teachers and peers, despite positive assessments of access to materials, time management, and professional skill development. The totality of patterns identified points to a sustained shift from existential-communicative values to an instrumental-pragmatic model. This shift is not fatal but requires conscious pedagogical effort to maintain axiological equilibrium by strengthening human agency, developing reflection, and fostering ethical evaluation of digital practices. Such effort prevents the impoverishment of education as a space for personality formation and its reduction to a system for producing competencies. It justifies the necessity of integrating an axiological component into digital transformation strategies in order to enrich the value content of the pedagogical process and preserve its humanitarian depth amid technological uncertainty.