The emergence of the post-industrial stage of development of the global community, the era of global economic, socio-political, scientific, cultural and worldview transformations, as well as the trend towards the development of an innovative economy, modernisation and technological re-equipment in the modern world require serious theoretical and conceptual analysis of the specifics, the place and role of human activity. For modern man, the relevance of such tasks is due to the fact that its technological backwardness is largely a consequence of outdated forms and methods of training socially developing people, oriented towards ‘mass industrial production 30-50 years ago’. The solution to the question of the specifics of modern social activity, the formation of educational technologies and an educational environment that meet the demands of the post-industrial era, goes beyond the scope of historical-scientific and narrowly technical disciplinary approaches and requires a cultural analysis. Modern technogenic civilisation gives rise to a corresponding form of socio-cultural existence, one of the specific features of which is the tendency to integrate technical education with science and the practices of introducing innovative technologies.
While the phenomenon of a unified ‘science and technology’ complex took shape at the end of the industrial era, the post-industrial era expanded this complex to include not only engineering and technical education, but education as a whole. The combination of ‘science, technology and socio-cultural education’, which defines the post-industrial era, forms the foundation of the modernisation potential of any society in the world. However, the weakest link in this combination is socio-cultural education, as its development is not always able to keep pace with the accelerating dynamics of global science, technology and society, and its goals, methods and means do not meet today's requirements. In this situation, there is a need to radically restructure socio-cultural education, to make it innovative, that is, to shape it through the acquisition not only of fundamental knowledge, but also of the latest scientific discoveries and achievements, scientific inventions made in the natural sciences, mastering the latest technologies and methods of their implementation in practice, the so-called human factor.
Creating such an education system will require moving the ‘learning platform’ to the forefront of research science, as well as changing the meaning of educational, sociological, and humanistic value orientations — ‘what to teach,’ ‘how to teach,’ ‘why to teach,’ that is, what rules of life to teach, what kind of thinking to form. It is accepted in modern technogenic society (which has come to believe that the fundamental cause of the crisis in European culture is scientism, embodied in the forms and manifestations of a worldview orientation that finds its embodiment in the modernist cultural paradigm), inevitably leading society to excessively developed practices of consumption, an instrumental and utilitarian attitude towards nature and man, and a pragmatic understanding of the cultural environment. The absolutisation of science and technology, the belief in the limitless possibilities of the creative mind, and the idea of the superiority of scientific knowledge as the universal worldview foundation of modern culture are some of the characteristics of the era that are considered to be the causes of profound socio-cultural transformations in society and higher education and that make research in this area relevant. The most painful of these is considered to be the technogenic transformation of culture, which leads to the destruction of traditional cultural ties and provokes personal alienation and a spiritless space of machinery.
When verbalising such cultural concerns and fears, it is customary to blame the dominance of the socio-technical paradigm on people directly involved in technical, technological and engineering activities. According to many researchers, the unfolding criticism of scientistic and technocratic ideologies makes ethical reflection and a developed critical worldview absolutely necessary for engineers, technologists, and any other specialists in the technical field. However, reflection and the ethical component in engineering are conditioned not so much by the existence of technocratic ideology as by innovations in post-classical science, in particular in synergetics, which have led to a new understanding of the possibilities of technological transformations of nature. The lack of development of socio-cultural issues in technology and technical education, as well as the backwardness in the training of engineers and other technical specialists, threaten the technological modernisation of contemporary society.