Abstract

This theoretical-reflexive work addresses the notions of symbol and imagination as cardinal faculties for the individual and social development of human beings. The interest in the concatenation of both notions to build society and the concealment they have experienced since the rise of rationalist and positivist thought is emphasized. In addition, the consequence of this dismissal of the symbolic and the imagination in the current formal educational system is addressed. This article warns that the situation through which the educational models and the form of teaching they reproduce respond to the purposes of the financial market, technoscience and the atomization of knowledge, which are nourished by a scientific-technological rationality thinking. This is to the detriment of humanistic knowledge which, due to its reflective and theoretical nature, enhances the development of symbolic and imaginative capacities.