In the context of globalization or the new economy and based on the analysis of higher education in recent decades, scholars on the subject have agreed on the need to "prevent the future" in the training of professionals who must respond to challenges typical of this process of constant change.
Thus in this 21st century, the demands that society poses to the Universities were viewed from a prospective perspective, from the last decade of the last century by various national and foreign researchers.
The future of yesterday, today is the present and what these researchers of the stature of - Acosta et al (1998), Tunnerman (1998) and others - scholars posed as a future scenario in higher education.
In this context, the incorporation of technology into education and the need to make the curriculum flexible as well as to rethink education with a holistic approach, is highly relevant. “The academic structure will be interdisciplinary, the study plans will acquire flexibility in their content and methods; The link between theory and practice will be achieved.
The fact that scientific knowledge becomes a productive force for industrialized societies has created an urgent need to clearly assess its meaning and its impact, even on the social fact as such.
Since the end of the 20th century, the dominant obsession has been the control of technological, social and cultural innovations that industrial society spreads throughout the world. The evaluations that on education, at all levels, and fundamentally on higher education, that international organizations have carried out, particularly the Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other international financial organizations, have conducted, in in recent years, to profound programmatic changes and also to serious budget restrictions and adjustments.
In other words, these international financial entities have set the standard when designing curricula for some countries of the world, many times it is incompatible as these entities design curricular matrices for third world countries as if they were the first, however this is not the discussion for now.
Faced with the phenomenon of globalization, it is up to the universities to offer viable and critical responses to the pressures and realities of each day, which seek to leave their survival in the hands of the market.
The open and distance university, both public and private, are outlined as valid paths that allow access by vast sectors to the knowledge and information society or vice versa, but without losing sight of defining an educational project against innovations is what more important in times of change, so Higher Education must strategically point in two directions; on the one hand, to provide more basic scientific and cultural training and, on the other, to link students to the problems of society, that is, that they are not alien to the social fact.
The continuous technological and economic changes oblige us to rethink the study plans that currently design a static profile of the professional.
Faced with this reality, both addressing a problem and alternative solutions from scientific and social perspectives require the participation of professionals from different fields, an entire multidisciplinary team. In this sense, content generation must emerge from multidisciplinary research to the extent that the borders between the various fields tend more and more to be shared, and accepting ideological diversity.
The global dynamic almost inevitably imposes on universities the training of competent professionals who are able to understand the changes and maintain a proactive vision in order to anticipate their required and changing responses. However, the quality of professional training depends not only on the knowledge and skills that are developed in the university curriculum, but also on the interests and values that regulate their professional performance.
Vocation complemented by love of the profession, responsibility, honesty and ethics are very tactical and essential values that regulate the performance of a competent professional with a vision of change.
The formation of values creates a complex pedagogical problem only understandable from a true psychological analysis of the nature of value in its regulatory function of human performance. In its psychological conceptualization, value must be analyzed taking into account its objective-subjective nature.
In this sense, values have, in addition to an individual existence, also a supra-individual existence, they all form part of social reality as a relation of meanings between the facts of social life and the needs of society, and historical as a system of values officially instituted in In a concrete society, we could finally say that understanding the objective-subjective nature of value is fundamental to all education.
The university is in the midst of new challenges in the production of knowledge that is marked by the fact that Michael Gibbons well points out:
“Academic disciplines show an increasing blurring of their borders: in many fields and programs, such as the human genome project, transdisciplinary work has become the norm, but the same trend is also observed in the social sciences: Examples of true global problems that defy all attempts to be addressed by a single discipline. Interactions between science, technology and social issues have intensified. In some areas, the demands of a participatory science have been articulated, in which the objective is no longer the truth "per se", but rather to make responsible public decisions that take into account the inherent scientific uncertainties ". *
General concept of curriculum. The curriculum understood as a permanent act, the result of simultaneous investigative and evaluative actions through the integrated chain of skills, behaviors, values, knowledge, assimilation and understanding, tends to develop the scientific or cognitive, investigative, axiological and labor functions of the individual.
The dialectic of the curriculum is based on the need to offer a formation for life: That is, some contents that take charge of the great changes that have occurred in civilization, knowledge and the regional, national and international reality; that they be pertinent and relevant and incorporate recent advances in pedagogy; that they offer all students the possibility to fully develop all their potential and their ability to learn throughout life.
A training that, in particular, endows them with an ethical character based on the personal development of freedom; in the consciousness of human dignity and of the rights and duties that emanate from the nature of the human being; in the sense of personal transcendence, respect for the other, solidarity life in society; respect for nature, love for truth, justice and beauty; in the sense of democratic coexistence; the entrepreneurial spirit and the feeling of the nation and the country, of its identity and traditions.
In other words, to currently devise a curriculum, you start with questions within the same Institution to imagine the kind of curriculum that is needed now to train and prepare students to act in the 21st century.
