Practice of Self-Dehumanization

Abstract

This article examines a context that is critical for understanding contemporary transformations in socio-cultural reality, with a particular focus on broadly understood educational practice. Specifically, it addresses dehumanization, and more precisely, the variant which may be called self-dehumanization. The analysis proceeds in two stages. First, the phenomenon of self-imposed dehumanisation is conceptualized using selected themes from the humanist tradition of mass society analysis (Znaniecki, Ortega y Gasset, Oakeshott, Sloterdijk). Second, the article poses a series of questions regarding the relationship between contemporary education and the core elements of self-dehumanization: the culture of cynicism, the ontology of ingratitude, intellectual-ethical inertia, and resentment. The discussion seeks to invite further examination of education as a potential environment for dehumanization and, above all, the tendency among educational actors toward self-degradation, a topic that remains underexplored in pedagogical theory and is often overlooked in educational practice.