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HUMANITARIAN APPROACH IN THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFELING PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION IN HIGH SCHOOLS
V. N. Skvortsov
The utilization of the humanitarian approach in lifelong professional education is brought about by both the external and internal circumstances of Russia's social development. Should we speak about the "external rationale", namely the expansion of the sphere of humanitarian approach utilization in lifelong education, it was caused, first and foremost, by internal requirements of the Russian high school, as well as the latter's involvement in the Europe-wide integration process. New formation specialists must become beams of a new professional culture corresponding to the modern information society and knowledge-based economy. The creative potential of high school graduates and our openness to the Western system of values offer a solid foundation for that. The procreation and formation of a similar system of axiological relationships and world outlook in Russians became an important tool of their lifelong professional education. It serves the processes of Russian society's integration into worldwide cultural, economical and educational processes that are actually aimed at forming specialists as subjects of a democratic civil society. The latter circumstance has a beneficial effect on the high school's interest in the training of specialists that are well versed in the humanitarian sphere. Universities and higher educational institutions establish educational standards of training specialists who are capable of living and working in a European style civil society (the introduction of European two-tier higher educational curricula and qualifications had precisely this aim in mind).
From the inner side of social changes, the causes for making an emphasis on a humanitarian approach in the lifelong education of highly qualified specialists are as follows: (a) public demand for changes in many types of complicated professional activities; (b) a real interest in making modern production processes more culture centered; (c) enhanced interaction between the processes of socialization, professionalization and culturation of present-day citizens; (d) forming students as the creators of intensive technologies, i.e. the specialists capable of feeling and foreseeing the prospects of development of all the system of ties, phenomena and professes in their respective professional sphere and understanding the social consequences of practical realization of these technologies. The utilization of a humanitarian approach in lifelong education is also connected with the following things: with changes in world outlook of the public conscience in modern Russian society; with the necessity of taking new, sometimes only presumed subtexts and intuitively felt senses of modern life and activities of its subjects that are not seen on the surface, are not evident and do not directly ensue from the past experience of functioning of social institutions of our country, including taking the educational system into account in the actual practice of lifelong education (all the above being humanitarian aspects of Russians' changed lifestyle). Whereupon their lifestyles not only expanded to the maximum in a spatial and geographical sense; it became swifter in time. These facts force the high school to pay more attention to the methods of and approaches to
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postgraduate education capable of bringing the specialists' actual expertise, knowledge and skills beyond the narrow framework of their professional practice and into a wide sphere of humanology connected with humanitarian competences, so that they would be striving to get involved in continuous self-education throughout their conscious lives.
The utilization of a humanitarian approach is connected with the incitement of an active creative search in the subjects of postgraduate education, with the satisfaction of their needs for personal self-realization, forming axiological and visionary reference points that would help them to adapt themselves to a changing society. A humanitarian approach permits one to teach specialists to feel the social and historical processes deeply and adequately, it permits faculty members to help their students remove mental stumbling blocks in communication with other people, to enhance their professional self-judgement in the process of taking courses, to make them feel the axiological significance of lifelong education for projecting and forecasting their professional activities, to renew their substantial content, etc. Of course, it is not possible to show all the aspects of humanitarian approach utilization in the lifelong professional education of specialists in a brief abstract. Therefore, we shall mention briefly just a few aspects of using humanitarian approach in this sphere. Firstly, we shall dwell on the didactic aspects of using the humanitarian approach in the organization of lifelong professional education. Secondly, we shall analyse its role in forming new life senses and axiological relationships in students. We shall conclude the abstract by a brief examination of the influence rendered by the humanitarian approach on the development of dialogical essence of lifelong education of highly qualified specialists. We shall conclude the abstract by a brief mention of the issues connected with the dialogical essence of lifelong education of highly qualified specialists as a tool for their personal and professional development.
In our opinion, the need for improving didactic aspects of humanitarian approach utilization in the organization of lifelong education is caused by the fact that the humanitarian approach permits one to direct the students' attention to the fact that technical and scientific progress by itself does not only enrich man's labor and life by creating an artifical habitat; at the same time, it complicates relationships within the framework of the "artificial habitat-man" system, "relativizes" boundaries between good and evil by expanding the number of a human being's ties and contact with the world and transforms profound communication between people into superficial, "tactile" "hanging out". As a result, their world perception becomes more shallow, and less solid and multidimensional. The enhancement of the influence of artificial habitat, signs and symbols on the life of society and indirectness of relatinships between people narrow the sphere of direct personal communication to a certain extent, hamper the acquisition of actual emotional experience, and create ample opportunities for the spread of crude pragmatism and soullessness. Under these conditions, as well-known psychologist and psychiatrist V. Frankl said, the role of humanitarian approach is to prepare a man "to the perception of a 10,000 commandments enclosed in a 10,000 situations encountered by him (let us remember Joyce's Ulysses - V.N.) in the course of his life. Not only his own life will look sensible to him (and sensible means filled with actions), but he will himself acquire immunity against... [his] existential vacuum [2, p. 39]. In other words, in terms of didactics, lifelong education must not boil down to the
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"informational and verbal" methods of transferring expertise, knowledge, skills and competences from the faculty member to the students. In lifelong education didactics, its humanitarian nature must take the shape of a continuous empowerment of the disciplines, aspects and nuances shaping a person's spiritual culture, in the enhancement of scientific and educational disciplines by culturological, axiological and socially significant didactic elements demonstrating historical ties between individual expertises, knowledge and skills - their cultural, conceptual and axiological genesis. The consolidation of such positions is connected with the solution to problems of designing a new educational milieu as a multidimensional space being adequate for the modern demands of a human being corresponding to the trends of development of modern culture, economics, industry and technologies. For this, one needs flexible algorithms of entering various didactic methods and patterns into a new human educational and life environment. For that, didactics must not only accommodate modern tendencies of objective world and the world of communications, connections and relationships in educational systems, but also transversal, cross-cultural tendencies, as well as complicated interaction, intertwinement and tying technical, objective, communicational, historical, axiological and conceptual content of modern lifelong education of specialists into a single inseparable (sometimes very intricate and contradictory) knot. All this entails the necessity of reorganizing the teaching environment, reforming its programs and plans on the bases of variability and alternativeness, organizing a specific "axiological and cultural subjectiveness" for the purpose of changing the activity of a postgraduate education subject. It makes it possible for an educational institution to become a real cultural center for adult communities and for the higher educational institutions’ faculty members, to enhance their professional culture and to expand the spheres of their pedagogical and scientific interdisciplinary competence In terms of substance, the humanitarian approach permits one to include axiological and visional dispositions of high school faculty members into the didactics of lifelong professional education, and to integrate culturological components within it. Such integral components integrating didactic and humanitarian aspects, including aesthetic and artistic ones, are, in particular, as follows: (a) relationships between the essence and the form of the educatory process; (b) "didactic rhythmics" of the educatory process and the "conceptual tensity" in the process of teaching; (c) the harmoniousness and proportionality of various links of the teaching process, expressed, e.g. in proportionality or
1 Humanitarian approach (including humanitarian knowledge) in lifelong education of engineering specialists permits, e.g. to meaningfully expand (through their interconnection) the unified substantial content of words being seemingly quite remote from each other, such as: warble, trance, harvest, stirrup, track, throne, string, guardian, fear, path, stress, line, tool, space, builder, triangle, structure, tradition, labour, etc. When we use the Russian verb stroit' (to build) we do not even suspect that the sense of building is uniting in a single whole three elements, because the root of this word consists of the sounds "TR" gravitating to the ancient Indian "tre" symbolizing the number of three, or the triad. Moreover, it is connected by the term of abstraction as well, because abstracts in an organ are levers connecting the keys with the valves opening access to air into the organ pipes - they are the major units of this instrument. In the hands of a master (it may be a musician, an architect or a mathematician) a "triangle" becomes a magic batons, and in distant centuries a triangle as a geometrical abstraction lay at the root of cosmogonic concepts. Abstraction is a method of tying essential components into an integral structure. This concept permits one to understand the concealed cultural and semantic codes of ties between the following russian words: strada, trassa, shtrikh, trek, trakt, put', because a path is a connection between objects and subjects situated in various points in space [3, p. 238-239].
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disproportionality between the volume of didactic functions of new expertise, knowledge and skills transfer and the volume of didactic functions of the students' stamping in the educational material they learned; (d) the "compositional" and "dramatic" features of teaching process organization (it can be the "glance didactics" and the "pause didactics"), as well as the artistic and lexical structures of language and the overtones of didactic communication of a teacher with his or her students. This is a specific "didactics of narrative" and "didactics of equal dialogue" [1, p. 75]. In our view, the humanitarian aspects of higher school faculty members' activities as the subjects of lifelong professional education manifest themselves most fully in these components.
From a didactic point of view, using a humanitarian approach in continuous professional education means enhancing its interdisciplinary nature. It is a reaction to the spread of a technocratic approach to education, to the domination of scientific disciplines and methods in it. Humanitarian and social disciplines cannot be taught and learned by the same methods as scientific ones. The imbalance between logically organized and rationalized by "emotionally dry" information and the humanitarian forms of learning in the present-day educational system brings about "single-hemicerebral development", the formation of a professionally competent but soulless individual. The utilization of a humanitarian approach must remove this imbalance by didactic methods and thereby help to solve the multifaceted problems and issues of the developmentof modern education in general and the lifelong professional education of specialists in particular. By ensuring interscience and interdisciplinary interaction, humanitarian approach permits one to find new didactic and methodic solutions, to enrich the traditional structure of lifelong education by new aspects and facets, to detect a wide horizon of ties in the knowledge and competences obtained by the lifelong education subjects and to make this horizon visible for them, to substantiate its scientific bases more succinctly, to substantiate continuity of teaching subjects and courses, to seamlessly join qualitatively different knowledge in both the content of lifelong professional education as a whole and in specific teaching subjects in particular by demonstrating that they reflect various facets of one and the same social process and to move from abstract scientific facts to specific, diversified knowledge and from that knowledge - to lasting practical skills and professional competences. It fosters the emergence of a complex and multifaceted pedagogical system co-opting the patterns and principles of the disciplines bordering on pedagogics: philosophy, psychology, physiology,
engineering and other sciences. This offers the subjects of lifelong education to push the indisciplinary envelope of their postgraduate training. From the didactic point of view, this means that lifelong professional education of specialists working in various professions must be effected on the basis of synthesis of various scientific and educational disciplines. It is no secret that to know the essence of any subject and process, one must detect interaction, correlations, interconnections, not their limitations and isolation. The essence of any phenomena is the interconnections that presuppose transcendence of this ambit of phenomena. A humanitarian approach permits one to reach a wide understanding of the essence of the sphere being studied through didactic changes of the lifelong education content. It permits students (irrespective of the type and level of an educational institution) to see and understand interaction and logical ties between various processes, not in the form of
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an external justaxposition of learning courses but in the form of their interpenetrating action, the development of some complex learning topics and courses from the other, simple ones. The utilization of humanitarian approach in lifelong education is a definite step in the changeover to training a specialist who is well-educated and possesses universal knowledge and is therefore capable to replace two or more persons in his or her former work team. In the decades to come, such specialists will be demanded by the civil society, and by the end of this century many areas of professional activities where so-called white-collar workers work will be transformed in deeply integrated indisciplinary areas of production process. In this situation, the introduction of interdisciplinary (integrated scientific and technological/humanitarian) approaches to educating highly qualified specialists into educational practice and engaging faculty members who have undergone interdisciplinary training and are capable of fulfilling this task becomes the most important problem of lifelong pofessional education. This is the essence of an important applied aspect of humanitarian approach utilization. It permits one: (a) to unite didactic and methodical requirements pertaining to forming students' professional expertise, knowledge, skills and competences into a single culturological, economical and professiological complex; (b) to form an unified terminological area of cultural, social and professional ideas in the students' minds; (c) to multidimensionally elicit employee's labor potential in their respective jobs and to show them, as subjects of actual production process, the essential strata of their social and economic relationships; (c) to detect the patterns of development of cultural aspects of the modern production process.
A humanitarian approach to training specialists in the lifelong education system presupposes leaning on senses, axiological relationships and dialog (as the substance, the essence and the "nerve") of all the subjects of those relationships. For the time being, the postgraduate education practice does not give us an exhaustive answer to the question about efficient ways of forming a system of axiological relationships between teachers in the postgraduate education system as socio-cultural situation changes. The utilization of the humanitarian approach (its development) promotes searching for effective solutions aimed at removing the existing discrepancies between the expected values of the postgraduate courses students and those that were actually formed, for the reduction of mismatches in the relationships between the pragmatic and the axiological aspects of their training. To connect a humanitarian approach seamlessly and efficiently to the process of forming the system of axiological relationships of lifelong education subjects, it is necessary to create dialogical technologies of lifelong professional education of highly qualified specialists as tools of their personal development. In this context, enriching the existing humanitarian knowledge in the system of lifelong education of specialist may be viewed from the point of view of their being universal to a certain extent as tools of forming a modern personality and "tying" senses and values of various periods of social development in a single "knot". Such "technologies" permit faculties members to open up the students' subjective world, to expand their interior space, the specific character of individual process of perception, etc. The development of lifelong professional education on a personal horizon, [4, p. 376] through its subjectified, personified knowledge, through its individualization, through its uniqueness of feeling and relationships acquires a priority significance in this case. Including systemized knowledge into the process of lifelong professional education makes teachers build the
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training process on the basis of dialogue (and polylogue), give up on feeding unmistakable normative truth to their students, and enhance the educational effect of refresher courses through mutual intercrossing and mutual stimulation of subjective worlds of its participants. Such experience is well known: it was used by Socrates, J.J. Rousseau, L.N. Tolstoy and J. Dewey. During the following period it was embodied in the paradigm of dialogical research and understanding the essence of culture founded on the works of M.M. Bakhtin, V.S. Bibler and Yu.M. Lotman. In this way, the humanitarian approach permits one to reproduce in the teaching process the fundamental conditions and preconditions for forming in the refresher courses students the demand to live on a personal horizon, to live freely and morally, according to the principle: "No one is higher than me, no one is lower than me" (V.S. Bibler, 1988).
It ensues from the above that the organizers of lifelong professional education must have a clear idea of axiological relationships arising between teachers and students as multidimensional pedagogic phenomena. They must ensure conceptually, methodically and technologically the forming of these relationships as purposeful movement along a certain algorithmic chain. At the first stage, they must position their aims, percepts and ideals, and to elicit their verbalization from the students. At the second stage, they must build relationships between themselves and the students as axiological and conceptual phenomena based on obtained knowledge. At the third stage, they must affirm the positive axiological orientations of the refresher course students and do their best to correct the negative ones. At the fourth stage, the teachers must try to form a new axiological and professional direction of their students' development. They must turn away from role-oriented, "cotton-wool" educational activities and approach (through subjective professional positioning) personal interaction with their students (we should note in parenthesis that these algorithms must be grounded and adapted for refresher courses students of various age groups).
As we complete our abstract, we should note the following important theses.
Firstly, forming a system of axiological relationships between refresher courses teachers and students is not important by itself. It only makes sense if after a few refresher courses an ordinary engineer or manager working at a production facility, an organization or an educational institution will be transformed into a specialist being a leader and a subject of a new corporate culture gradually being formed in the bowels of the present-day industry and civil society. Should he or she become a "transdisciplinarily trained professional" (Berger G., 1972) instead of a technocrat, his or her percepts will permit him or her to make multidimensionally interpreted and well thought-out proposals aimed at rationalizing the production process and having positive effect being highly efficient from the human, social and economic points of view. It persons are always in the center of his or her attention, if he or she learns to build up trust-based relationships with his or her subsidiaries and colleagues, if he or she founds his or her actions on the essential values of his or her colleagues, find the out together with them and find solutions for the most important issues of further organizational developments together with them, If he or she is capable to motivate colleagues by his or her actions to act not only in their personal interests, but in the interests of the whole collective body.
Secondly, as the higher school organizes lifelong education and connecting humanitarian approaches to it in the near future, it must develop educational
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algorithms of training professionals who are capable to comprehensively support the activities of responsible self-regulated teams and to develop a range of professional qualities and abilities in their employees. From this point of view a higher educational institution graduate or a refresher course student must learn how to form in his or her "team" a system of (not roles but rights and duties and a new philosophy on their basis) of professional relationships, to build up his own creative potential and to help his or her colleagues enhance their, to take responsibility for the actions of his or her subsidiaries. This is in keeping with the spirit of the present-day most productive and successful industrial collectives, firms and organizations. Of course, that must not be just know-how but strategies of developing one's own professional activities actually applied in practice. E.g., the strategies of forming new values in his or her subsidiaries, introducing flexible leadership technologies when the functions of a leader are assumed by different employees depending on the situation, etc.
Thirdly, within the framework of lifelong postgraduate education, the higher educational facilities - universities, institutes, educational centres and other educational facilities must train specialists who are well versed in the modern "dialogue lobic" and humanitarian competences, dialogical world outlook and twenty-first century philosophy (V.S. Bibler, 1991). They must be able to listen and perceive complex and dynamic information, to work under the conditions of modern "cultural explosion" (Yu.M. Lotman, 1992), and to communicate and conduct a constructive and substantial dialogue in complex and problematic situations. In this sense, the lifelong professional education system is faced with a task of teaching the whole set of professional and humanitarian competences to the specialists. It will permit them to become a creative link in the development of a specific organization/firm: (a) through innovations and a creative attitude to their work; (b) through solving problems arising in the process of production in an efficient manner; (c) through building human relationships and ties between various teams of employees and individual employees of their respective organization; (d) through continuous development of their qualities and qualifications; (e) by relying on common sense and consistency, on initiative and leadership, on the ability to go all the way in any case, on willpower and communicability. In our opinion, this in particular is the mission of lifelong education as a whole, and its subsystem, the postgraduate lifelong education.
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