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HUMAN KNOWLEDGE IN THE CONTEXT OF POST-INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION
A. K. Oreshkina
In the context of the ideology set out by UNESCO (Geneva, 2004) that prioritizes the acceptance of the conceptual idea of continuous learning throughout one's life, modern education includes the following: upbringing, training and development of the worldview and life philosophy of a personality. In this interpretation of the strategy of modern paradigmatic trends in education, the prognostic foundation of human knowledge is a distinctive feature of education programs typical of the sociocultural nature of the postindustrial era of education. The priority of human knowledge in the 21st Century — the century of intellectual, social and communication networks — necessitates applying a meta-subject approach to forecasting the content of human knowledge on the basis of a forward-looking strategy oriented toward these new times. From this perspective, the reorientation of the structure, content and institutional framework of subsystems of national education as a complex system of building a new educational model guides us toward a stable trend of building the lifelong education model as an institute of socialization and spiritual development of a personality.
Building our identity in modern society by fleshing out the «who are we?» question becomes an important contextual component of apprehensions of the developing world. From this perspective, it is reasonable to consider human knowledge in the context of the leading identity forms, such as civil identity (perception of a person as a member of a certain social system), ethno-cultural and regional identity (perception of a person subject to the certain ideological nature of an ethnic community) and panhuman identity (perception of a person in the global scale). Therefore in the context of the lifelong education idea, this approach is consistent with the need for the development of personal and socially significant human knowledge that provides the worldview foundation and orientation toward an aggressive search for a productive activity in any age. In this context, it is relevant to rethink objectives and conditions of the efficient operation and development of the educational process consistently with changes in traditional ideas of the social meaning of lifelong education programs.
New organizational forms of lifelong education that accommodate the requirements of establishing a new model of national education are consistent with the essence of personal self-determination and self-fulfillment. The development of the continuity in lifelong education correlates with the increasing meaning of informal education, self-education and the increasing functional importance of socially institutionalized structures of society and
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their educational potential expanding into the education sector. This trend guides us to undertake a new task in educational science: make the education process open and accessible to all age groups. In this connection, the developing integration of education entities of various types of lifelong learning in terms of structure and content involves bringing education programs into correspondence with each other in lines of education (general, professional, additional), organizational forms and organizational and structural components of the education process (target, content, motivation, management, evaluation and performance).
It is important to keep in mind that as a social institute, the national education system involves the processes of both controlled development and self-development and self-organization. This manifests itself in the following ways: first, the transition from discrete, step-by-step forms of general and professional education to an integrated system of lifelong education; second, task-oriented management of the development of the education system at the government level, which promotes the need for conceptual, methodological and legal support of general and professional education. This change of direction in education is consistent with the development of non-institutional (alternative) forms of lifelong education that are typical of the structural organization of all its subsystems and, to a great extent, programs of lifelong professional education aimed at updating the traditional content of human knowledge.
In this context of understanding the role of human knowledge, the issue of continuity of the education process becomes especially relevant both as a manifestation of the systematic and coherent nature of the process of consistency between multilevel education programs and as a prerequisite for structuring an integrated, multicomponent system of lifelong education. Therefore, the major theoretical and methodological problem of the continuity of human knowledge in terms of its theoretical presentation may be regarded from the perspective of manifestation of the forms of connection between discrete conditions of the education process (programs) in subsystems of institutional and non-institutional education.
The consideration of the process of continuity of human knowledge in this context from the perspective of development of modern pedagogical theory involves a correlation with the leading ideas of development in global education processes: lifelong education and post-industrial education. This leads to understanding the continuity of the content of humanities education in the context of post-industrialism as a form of connection between different stages or steps of the evolutionary development.
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Education programs implemented in subsystems of education are in many cases characterized by: (a) a certain degree of self-sufficiency; (b) an insufficiently pronounced personality-oriented motivational basis, which manifests itself in unstable motivation toward self-fulfillment and selfexpression as a personality; (c) insufficient motivation toward creative activity; (d) lack of wide variability in education programs (paths) to meet the variability requirement. Hence, a person's mobility in choosing them is limited to some degree. Therefore, in order to «establish a connection» between the needs of a person, society, government, different social groups and the national education system itself, it is necessary to devise a new methodological approach toward the structuring of the continuity of the content of human knowledge as a process and outcome of the consistent and systemic interrelation between education programs. As a process, the continuity involves an interrelation between education programs taking into account their hierarchy in the system of lifelong education, which is provided by their «vector» focus, which creates a choice of programs to master. This is possible if a person determines a motivation- and value-based path for mastering and gaining sociocultural experience and realizing the need for optimal adaptation to changing socioeconomic conditions in the postindustrial society.
The continuity of the content of human knowledge as a process and outcome is about providing diversity of forms of interaction between new and standard types of education programs that are implemented by institutional education entities. This will create conditions for the achievability of variable education paths of a person that are limited neither in time nor in form of manifestation, which is in line with the conceptual provisions of the lifelong learning theory set out in the international instruments of UNESCO.
It would be reasonable to present a dialectic approach to developing a holistic concept and building a model of the continuity of human knowledge from the perspective of a constructive function which is expressed through the characterization of conditions for reducing «gaps» in the successive connection in the contents of integrated education programs. In this connection, we see the constructive and technical function of managing the continuity in organizing and implementing the education process as methods of teaching (learning) the organizational culture of project-and process-based activity and upbringing (self-actualization, selffulfillment, self-expression) provided certain conditions are met, such as: first, the state education standards for lifelong professional education are developed; second, there is a legal framework for new types of integrated education programs implemented within the multi-component system of life-
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long professional education; and third, new concepts for training a teacher (specialist) of lifelong professional education are devised, etc.
Thus, it is reasonable to present the theoretical and methodological context of the development of the continuity of human knowledge and its structuring from the general perspective of selecting content on the basis of the following principles: (a) consistency of the content of all elements of education at all levels of its design with the modern requirements of science, production and society; (b) taking into account the content-specific and procedural dimensions of training, meaning that all subjects included in a curriculum should encompass all types of human activities in their interrelation with each other; and (c) structural unity of the education content at different levels of its creation, taking into account personal development and achievement of personhood. The common foundation of the above principles of selecting the content of human knowledge is a focus on the implementation of the idea of structuring of the content to render modern education innovative and universal.
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