Introduction At the beginning of a new century, in the world and in our country, society demands an unprecedented demand for higher education, based on awareness of the fundamental importance that this type of education has for sociocultural development and economic and for the construction of the future. The university in the 21st century claims the demands of a solid cultural formation as the foundation of the global understanding of the time in which one lives. The training process has been oriented towards a broad and profound vision determined by the impetuous development of science and technology in close interconnection with the different spheres of knowledge, as well as by its impact on the entire life of society.
Today's university must be a key factor for scientific development; the scientific, technological and humanistic university model combines strengths that are unique attributes: a high concentration of men of science and thought, which makes the university a social institution with the capacity to generate new knowledge and skills to understand technological developments, and with ability to spread, socialize such knowledge.
It is a time when the Revolution has directed its efforts to building a university in correspondence with the dream of Martí, that it be brilliant, useful and in accordance with the times, state and aspirations of the countries in which it teaches. The Cuban university will be in charge of training professionals with independence and creativity, endowed with ethical values, in accordance with the scientific-technical development that is experienced in the world, capable of solving the problems that arise in their professional work.
Development
In the times in which we live, the universities, in addition to fulfilling their social mandate as a cultural institution, have the purpose of ensuring the quality of the integral formation of the professional's personality, through the university substantive processes (teaching, research and extension).
The comprehensive approach to educational and political ideological work constitutes the master strategy of Higher Education, for universities it is a real challenge to train professionals whose values respond to responsible professional action committed to solving problems in their work environment, demonstrating competence in their performance and a citizen performance worthy of the highest moral values that distinguish our society.
The center of the educational work is the ethical training of the professional, for this the comprehensive approach promotes the application of methods and the deployment of the contents of the subjects to form from instruction the ethical values that characterize each professional.
Universities constitute a cosmopolitan space for ethical learning since they are the disseminating centers of culture par excellence; The university and its faculty of professors have always been in the vortex of the transformations that society imposes on them, critical thinking, the need for progress, the search for rigor and truth in all areas have prevailed as fundamental trends. domains and processes, especially when it comes to changes in ways of thinking and promoting the capacity of students towards these same procedures.
Ethics, science and values
The term ethics is derived from the Greek word ethos, which means dwelling place or place. Currently, ethics is defined as the philosophical discipline that studies the moral behavior of man in society. It is, therefore, a branch of philosophy, whose object of study is morality, which is inherent in man as a social being. From this relationship between science and its content, it is understood that ethics is the theory of morals, which can be defined as a system of opinions, representations, norms and evaluations on the regulation of the behavior of individuals.
Two levels have been described in the relationship between ethics and morals, critical ethics and applied ethics. The first consists of a logical and epistemological analysis of ethical principles, determining the validity of certain opinions or moral beliefs. Applied or normative ethics seeks to guide behavior in deciding which is the best option among those possible, in a specific situation.
As Mario Bunge has pointed out, science as a whole is not ethically neutral and the principles it proposes for a moral code of science are intellectual honesty or worship of the truth, independence of judgment, intellectual courage, love for intellectual truth and the sense of justice.
Within the set of moral principles prevailing in a society at a specific historical moment, there are those referring to professional morality, understood as such the set of powers and obligations that the individual has by virtue of the profession he exercises in society.
Contemporary scientific-technological development has put professionals in a dilemma between technology and values, not sufficiently studied, and in need of a methodological approach in order to generate an ethic of sustainability.
The impact of vertiginous technological development on education in the context of globalized market laws is expressed in the tendency to consider the production of science and technology as the end of education. In a society like Cuba there are no factors that explain the presence of some situations that characterize the Latin American social and educational environment (exclusion, unemployment, etc.). However, there are some weaknesses and threats that are shared, such as the possible progressive deterioration of educational quality to the extent that it departs from the needs and problems of the sociocultural context, as well as the privilege of technical education and undervaluation of the humanistic, among others.
Any attempt to preserve the relevance and quality of higher education in the midst of this context, marked by the transnationalization and economic, cultural and social denationalization of the unipolar and globalized world, involves the need to work intensively for the consolidation of students of the system of moral values that order judgments on the moral life of society and the actions derived from those judgments.
Values have been defined as the reasons that are constituted; they are configured in the process of socialization of man and at the same time, they articulate the expression of man in his different spaces of relationship. They arise as a result of understanding.
The role of education in the formation of values is based on propitiating the appropriate occasions for the students (individually and collectively) so that they configure through their own experience and language their values, which constitute the personality and human individuality. Unacceptable values cannot exist in reality. Therefore, the space of value is in individuality. Talking about ethical training means approaching the moral education of individuals on the basis of the internalization of a certain value system, through a process of conscious, contextualized and argumentable personal construction.
The determination of which are the components of a given value system for a specific socio-historical context is, therefore, the starting point of the training process, and possibly for Higher Education one of the most arduous tasks that must be carried out.
Some considerations on comprehensive training and ethical learning in universities
The continuous and substantial transformations of today's society generate countless existential conflicts that put historically formed values in crisis, new values emerge in a dialectical contradiction between "the new" and "the old" that represents a state of necessity for educational innovations in universities.
Perhaps this demand of society constitutes a challenge that helps to promote changes in the university in the face of the task of forming values in students and not staying in the simple "apprehension" of attitudes that never become convictions and consequently contrast with the new paradigms of society.
The axiological training is located in the debate of the objectives and the contents that are the object of student learning as part of their university training, so the methods and procedures that the teacher designs for the teaching-learning process of their subject, largely determine the efficiency in the axiological training process, particularly those that contribute to ethical training, which will be the center of attention.
The incorporation of ethical aspects into the teaching-learning process in universities and the creation of conditions that enable a highly stimulating scenario for ethical learning, requires a clear understanding of the role of the comprehensive approach and its instrumentation in the educational teaching process, going through the design of the model of formation of values in the career and concretizing itself in the formative objectives of the year, as the subsystem where the integration of the instructional and the educational is achieved. Values arise in a socio-historical context and are intended to provide human beings with symbolic instruments and adequate practices to survive and develop a full life.
It is normal for the formation and assimilation of these values to take place wherever they are generated; within the cultural construction itself in social practices; economic, political, in the reproduction of life, formal education can only strengthen what daily life in the world of work and social relations determine. Through education, the ethical and spiritual contents of these daily practices are identified, then, and as an element that reinforces and consolidates this training, is the community, which considers in its experience as valuable for its effectiveness those values that manage to reproduce the quality of life of the person and allow the present generation to leave them a worthy inheritance to the next.
The comprehensive approach is part of the humanistic social educational paradigm of Cuban universities in the training of professionals in a comprehensive general culture, where values are the guiding principles of personality formation, hence the teaching-learning process constitutes the The most effective way for the axiological training of the students, during its design and realization, an active role of the teacher and the dedication of the teacher in the planning, organization and execution of the teaching, extension and socio-political activities that contribute to the educational project will be promoted. of the year, where students are fundamental actors in the ethical learning process.
From the methodological point of view, the development of a professional ethics oriented to humanism cannot take place according to the neoliberal formulas of search and formation of their own value system by young people. This is interpreted as a fantasy that seeks to ignore the influence of globalization and justify the lack of commitment of universities in the education of youth. Faced with these formulas, the role of the teacher stands out as a key element due to the strength of his personal example and the ability he has to achieve a conscious role for young people in their own training.
Ethical training is part of the axiological learning system, the design of the career model identifies the ethical values that characterize the professional performance mode, in each of the axiological training directions that characterize the comprehensive approach; say the ethical-moral formation, and the ideo-political formation.
Curricular work entails a coherence between professional profile-study plan-subject programs-execution of the processes that comprise it, and all of them paying tribute to the training objectives.
The curricular modalities adopted by the universities must be guided by this objective of comprehensive training. In this regard, it will be necessary to pay particular attention to the development of artistic education, understood not as the training of artists but as the possibility of accessing knowledge and appreciation of the different manifestations of art as one of the maximum expressions of human creativity.
Likewise, comprehensive training should pay particular attention to physical development and sports practice, aimed at promoting higher levels of health, and the development of fair play habits, self-care and teamwork.
The integral formation of the personality implies a sustained educational work so that the student develops as a subject of law. This implies that you know yourself, that you interact with others and that you have all the conditions to define your life project.
Extracurricular work, both teaching and extension work, must also be structured in a system and around the training objectives. The comprehensive approach to educational work is specified in the educational project of the academic year and the student brigade.
Any advance in obtaining results in the education of the personality of the students, must necessarily start from a more organic work, in which the curricular educational work is complemented by the extracurricular and the extensionist, harmoniously oriented to the achievement of the values that as citizens and professionals must carry graduates.
The improvement of study programs, with greater precision of the educational aspects that are intended to be achieved, and particularly those related to ethical training throughout the degree course, is an element that in our opinion would contribute to raising the participatory nature of the teachers and to promote the harmonious articulation of the remaining variants of the work of training the personality of young people.
Conclusions
Although there are innumerable difficulties in carrying out the educational work of the Revolution, the strengthening of the leading role of training centers, including Universities, must be based on the solid foundations created by all those who throughout history have contributed to the formation, development and consolidation of Cuban nationality up to the present time and in the search for humanistic methods that put students at the center of all institutional activity, as the main creators of their own personality under the guidance of teachers. This is an urgent task that will make its way regardless of the difficulties.
Educational quality must encompass the integrality of the subject. From this point of view, it is necessary that basic and universal training provide educational opportunities that strengthen all dimensions of personality: cultural, social, aesthetic, ethical and religious. The integral formation supposes to strengthen the capacity of each one to define his project of life, freedom, peace and solidarity, equality, justice, responsibility and the common good.
Comprehensive, ethical and values training requires: working with teachers, curricular work and extracurricular work.
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