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EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT
AS A PRECONDITION OF DEVELOPMENT
OF A COMPETITIVE PERSON
0. V. Balandina
1. A. Monastyrskaya
This article is aimed at analyzing the new strategy of the Russian educational system, which keeps the advantages of traditional education, combining them with ensuring competitiveness in modern civilization. The authors observe the weaknesses of the competence-based approach, which is grounded on focused education, appropriate for an industry-specified extensive economy. In an innovative economy, an employer prefers an «extended-profile» candidate, who is expected to be creative, dynamic, and socially responsible. The educational environment is the core factor of competitive personal development.
Key words: educational environment, knowledge society, competencies, creative competitive person.
Large-scale changes in society and the economy (aggravation of geopolitical problems, increased competition in all fields, and a significant breakthrough in information and communication technologies) raise the issue of changes in the sphere of education. What can the sphere of education offer, and which priorities will be chosen? To train a specialist who is competent in his or her specific professional activity aimed at serving specific structures, or a 21st century person, who is highly educated, and has the intellectual potential to meet the needs of the "knowledge society’s" development. This is a creative person, who is also competent in his or her profession, and socially mature and responsible. We need a comprehensive analysis of the problems of education that have manifested themselves so vehemently in Russian society during the last few decades. A new strategy of development of the Russian education system is being created at present. This system would retain the advantages of traditional education, and at the same time make it competitive in modern civilization. Russian education is faced by the immediate tasks connected with the need for adapting the transformation of the educational system: firstly, it should correspond to the innovative model of economic development; secondly, it should be adapted to the social requirements of educational service providers and users; thirdly, it should meet the requirements of global competition on the innovation, labor and education markets.
Western models of educational process organization, and templates of standards and management technologies, were chosen as landmarks for the new strategy of Russian education. Having become a part of the Bologna system, Russian education adopts, in particular, the competence-based approach. Competences are the basic units in the professional sphere that specifies certain requirements for the quality and standards of a specialist's training. It should be noted that attitudes to the competences among European specialists is not unanimous. For example, the critics of the Bologna system who formed the Bildung und Wissen e.V. - die Gesellschaft fur Bildung und Wissen e.V. (GBW) society in
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2010, think that leveling curriculums through competences is an attempt to "economicize" education. In Japan, the fostering of citizens and patriots is considered as the primary task of education, the inculcation of a thirst for knowledge as the secondary one, and shaping competences needed for labor and other functions is considered only as tertiary.
Arguments about the transition to a two-level system of training do not cease in the Russian science as well. The heads of some higher educational institutions protected their rights to train specialists in a number of fields (medicine, architecture, engineering), and retained the former terms of their training. In view of the fact that the half-life period of competences is 4-5 years, it would be hardly permissible to reduce the tasks of education to shaping a set of professional competencies. The countries of the European Union have adopted the Bologna System and attempted to create a universal model of a specialist, first and foremost, because they had a shortage of their own qualified manpower. Can the labor market be a judge in the issues of the quality of education and its priority goals? Are employers capable of determining the need for specialists and the quality of their training? Can they influence the vectors of education? Is it worthwhile dismantling the former system of education, or reducing the content of training to the formulas of competencies and general skills in which only the economy, but not society as a whole, is interested? More likely than not, the answers to those questions are in the sphere of interaction of all the labor market’s participants. In this case, the professional skills of graduates can be brought into conformity not only with the expectation of the labor market, but to the sociocultural needs of society for personnel training. Contemporary university graduates need a comprehensive, universal education, which is only possible in the unity of humanitarian, natural science, and technical education.
Innovative development is connected with a change in the system of values and goals of social development. As a result, the anticipatory development of education determines the need for shaping a proactive attitude to life in young people, a desire to develop and realize their personal and professional potential. The cognitive and axiological focus of universities' pedagogical activities built on a dialog and mutual understanding of all its participants has a great significance for shaping abilities to project the future, to bear responsibility for it, belief in oneself and one's abilities to influence that future, to foresee the consequences of one's acts and to assess them. This process can be efficient on the condition of competent selection of students and the creation of a favorable educational environment as a precondition for development, self-development and interaction between the subjects of educational and professional processes, their forms, and a teacher's professional attitude. In our opinion, the process of training a specialist may be optimized through taking into account a number of conditions and factors, namely: (a) the processes of purposeful shaping of competitiveness; (b) the processes of eliciting personal properties, the methods of a future specialist's communication and interaction with his/her future colleagues; (c) a person's focus on reaching high results; (d) a positive professional focus.
A university graduate discovers a cognitive gap between theoretical knowledge and actual practice. Afterwards, as a specialist gains experience, he or she discovers a cognitive gap again: this time between practice and the
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impossibility of understanding and applying it. Under the conditions of a lack of goal setting and planning, we must shape not only technology and communication skills, but conceptual thinking as well.
Continuous education is the pedagogical precondition to the development of a specialist's competitiveness. It is assured by meeting the following conditions: A person's preparedness for improving his or her education level throughout his or her life; a high motivation for the improvement of educational level; the opportunity to get an education, and consistency in education at all stages. The pedagogical conditions of the success of continuous vocational education are as follows: (a) assuring positive motivation of students, developing the need for continuing one's vocational education, strengthening of the students' emotional and willpower sphere focused, among other things, on mastering the necessary competencies; (b) the organization of training at a high complexity level; (c) the activation of consciousness, thinking, imagination, the willpower of students aimed at developing interest in their specialty; (d) fostering high moral and psychological qualities, discipline and responsibility in students; (e) eliciting professionally important personal qualities and abilities in students and their development in relation to the profession they have learned.
Our experience (a poll of students of the Academy of Labor and Social Relations and V.G. Shukhov Belgorod State Technology University, carried out in autumn 2014), demonstrates that young people are not inclined to persevere with regular work: students devote two to five hours per week to self-study. Their wish to get a higher education is connected, first and foremost, with potential selfdevelopment and building one's life path (62%), determining one's career prospects and professional horizons (63%) [2, p.21]. Most higher educational institutions’ students view education as "the shortest way to career growth and a high salary". Contemporary practice demonstrates serious contradictions between the purposes and interests of "Generation Y", and the institutional routines and norms. Negative re-orientation of youth is especially noticeable in the sphere of labor. On one hand, the range of operative motives for self-realization in this generation is increased because of better information awareness, and on the other hand, the labor values are not present among their primary values. The fact is, that the sector of simple services, real estate operations and trade where higher education, high qualification and work experience are not needed, is the most attractive for young people. Meanwhile, only a specialist who has a personal need for connecting narrow professionalism and universality, the need for selfdevelopment can be competitive. Because qualification presupposes, apart from the availability of an education certificate, a certain level of professional skills, as well as mastering the technologies which ensure the attainment of one's goals.
A survey of national education systems performed by these authors (2012) brought them to the conclusion that the tertiary education system retains its cultural national peculiarities even under the conditions of market globalization [1, pp. 553559]. Unlike education in the USA where the private sector prevails, in Russia the education system needs state support. We need a dialog of all the interested parties: civic society, the state, the education system, the family, the person him- or herself. Russian pedagogic experience must be taken into account.
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Russian experience in the education system was always based on the unity of education and fostering of personality. For example, as 19th century Russian thinkers analyzed the experience of European education, they stated that it was based on the principle of separated, specialized (Jesuitical) learning, resting on some readily visible abilities of a person. Such a narrow specialization hinders the development of a holistic personality, and his or her spiritual potential. In the early 20th century, Ivan Ilyin warned about the hazards of separation of the education and upbringing processes: "education without upbringing does not shape a man; it unleashes and spoils him because it puts advantageous opportunities and technical skills at his disposal, and he, spiritless, conscienceless, unbelieving and weak-willed, begins to abuse them [3, p. 179]”. It is evident that education must not only teach and socialize a person but to lay the axiological groundwork of a personality that cannot be designed on purpose but permits to shape the "axiological immunity" of society, and to develop the moral and civic qualities of a person. In such a dialog context, education can be viewed "as a large model of every life taking place in time" (E. Rosenstock-Huessy). Russian pedagogics viewed education as, primarily, a mechanism of cultural reproduction of the nation and only secondarily, as a channel of transferring knowledge. Education is not an inconvenient supplement to life’s realities, but a condition of existence of every person and every culture.
Bibliography
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3. Ильин И.А. О воспитании в грядущей России // Собрание сочинений: в 10 т. - М.: Русская Книга, 1993. - Т. 2. - Кн. 2. - 480 с.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translastions Bureas
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