The teaching of social history and the sciences, technologies and professions

Abstract

The social study of science and technologies is a field of pedagogical and theoretical reflection that strives to understand the change of rationality in scientific thought and the social aspects of its historical development. While the epistemological problems of this rationality assume the continuous movement of knowledge in the investigative communities (with errant or transitory validity)—its successes or failures, advances and backward movements, discoveries or justifications—the social aspects keep in mind the economic and political implications of this development in the State, private enterprises, the university and, in general, the cultural relations that have transformed the world setting.

These lines are proposed to establish the importance of a study of the social history of the sciences and modern technologies, contemporaneous with the curriculum, and suggest new senses and orientations for its teaching and communication.