**1. Introduction**

It is evident that university students have acquired an ethic synergistically from the family and the environment that we call civil society, the latter made up of all the institutions contemplated in our legal system. We ask ourselves: Is there a line of ethics teaching in the formal pre-university educational process? If it exists, how much has it influenced the student? Is there a reinforcement of ethics other than professional ethics in undergraduate education? Can the students integrate these ethics into their academic development? To what extent can they develop, in their university career, an ethical basis beyond the deontological one, which allows them to influence the strengthening or reconstruction of the State from the ethical point of view and of a new conception of a popular culture contrary to corruption?

All these questions lead us to affirm that our most urgent problem is not to underpin the oil industry or the national electric system but to rethink the State in its educational role with emphasis on the university system, especially when we speculate that we are facing a structure of social thinking, where individualistic behavior is exalted. It brings, consequently, the destruction of the ethical culture, which had been gradually built since the post-war independence in the last third of the nineteenth century and especially in the twentieth century.

As a result of the devastation, it would seem that this is our Latin American problem, an ostensible lack of civil and civic values, with ominous indigence regarding the observance of any principle of public or private justice, where even the most desperate thing is not the violation of the norms of any kind, but that those who are victims and victimizers do not even realize that they are, because they simply ignore what could constitute a decent behavior adjusted to a civic and ethical principle.

By way of reference, says Sime-Rendón [1], it is unacceptable how, in one of our Latin American countries, for example, the slogan *"He steals but does work"* enabled a particular character to ascend to essential spheres of power, taking advantage of the level of axiological orphan hood of certain social strata. With the same perverted framework, León [2] analogically reminds us that some members of an important political group of another country popularized the saying: *you have to vote for…, because they steal, but let them steal, while those of the party…, steal on their own*. The party that promoted the nefarious electoral budget won the elections. Not to mention the popular thought when someone states: *look, (such a person) served as a minister and left office with nothing in his pockets*, alluding to his honesty as a foolish behavior. At the same time, some famous Latin American sayings that praise corruption are mentioned by Tapia [3]:


Therefore, this work aims to motivate a reflection on the field of education as a whole and in the various manifestations of civil society. This, with emphasis on citizen participation as an ethical control of the rulers, so that the university professional, together with the new Latin American constitutionalism, can better link with the community to eventually reverse the damage that radical economic liberalism has done to us with its premise of let it be done, let it pass. Moreover, with the pseudoethics of having, expressed in the aphorism, so much you have, so much you are worth, you have nothing, you are worth nothing. Along this path, we will verify the conditions in our legal system to achieve the proposed objective, given that there are

ideal scenarios for this purpose. For example, we will compare citizen participation between Venezuela and Ecuador to confirm the equality of interests associated with incorporating the constituent power in the constituted power**.**

From the methodological point of view, we will anchor our considerations on some classical and modern thinkers who have always placed ethics as a necessary condition for any social progress about citizen development. Along this line, we will propose some solutions that could imply, in university teaching, some ontological and axiological variations.
