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CONTINUING EDUCATION AS A COMPONENT OF NATIONAL CULTURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES AS A GLOBAL MISSION
LIFELONG EDUCATION AND THE DYNAMIC OF CULTURE M. I. Vishnevsky
To form and grow as a person, a human being needs to be constantly and meaningfully in touch with society’s culture and its wealth of collective experience, and to keep absorbing that experience throughout his entire conscious life. This can only be accomplished through the medium of education. No one is born with a personality; personality has to be nurtured into existence. This nurturing and the subsequent growth are usually described as "education”, meaning the formation of socially relevant personal qualities, or "socialization”, understood to mean the mastering of social experience by an individual. The difference between those two concepts may lie in the fact that education is more about absorbing information and then transforming it into something unique, a unique personality that has an internal dimension as well as an external, "social” one, whilst "socialization” focuses mostly on the external, "social” prerequisites of personal formation and growth.
In culture, everything new is the work of people who are driven, possess the necessary training and are capable of creating. Every creation bears an imprint of the creator’s socio-cultural context, as well as personality. This is true for a work of art or a folk artifact, and it’s true for a new moral concept, scientific theory, political idea or religious teaching. However, to become a recognized part of society’s cultural heritage, the creation must be in tune with the interests, aspirations and motivations of other people, must win their support and approval. Every time this happens, the work of art may be interpreted somewhat differently, and sometimes the interpretation will have little or nothing to do with the creator’s intent. In a complex, stratified modern society and its culture, there are intricate coordination and subordination processes at work that dictate how the different occurrences and phenomena are perceived. Those processes, inter alia, manifest themselves in how people’s daily life interrelates with their multifarious specialized activities: science, art, religion, mass media, politics, engineering and keeping up sophisticated technology and processes, and so on.
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In today’s day and age, education is for the most part delivered within an institutionalized social domain that employs a vast number of people: the teachers and support staff of preschool institutions, secondary schools, technical schools, colleges, universities, retraining and re-skilling institutions, postgraduate institutions, libraries, publishers, education authorities, and so on. Education is one of the more resource-intensive industries that consumes about a quarter of the country’s entire spending budget. Education may claim even more resources later on as Belarus, like many other countries, moves towards becoming a "knowledge society” in which education will play a pivotal role. Along with institutionalized education, non-institutional forms of learning, or "self-education”, are gaining greater prominence in the life of individuals and society overall. Self-education may be random or follow a plan, but it sometimes does more good than a regular school or university. In self-teaching, a person will follow his own path, the one he finds interesting, attractive and promising. Tremendous help in this comes from the mass media, most notably, the Internet.
In relation to the learning process, the central meaning of culture in a person’s life cannot be denied. Ultimately, culture is what constitutes the essence of education, its sap that every person is supposed to ingest. Once absorbed, comprehended and processed by a person in light of his own experience, interests, abilities, etc., the culture of a society translates into the culture of an individual. The two "cultures” may differ vastly in volume, but do not have to differ in essence or to be mutually opposed, and they’re certainly not in a mature person who is truly aware of what is happening or what can be observed in the world that person lives in, participates in.
For too many people, the general education they received in secondary school, regrettably, remains the pinnacle they will never revisit, except perhaps in the chosen area of their professional training. The same holds for higher education, which we keep calling "higher” by force of tradition and not by virtue of what it really is or what it does. Institutional education, therefore, has enormous responsibility on its shoulders, arising out of its special mission - to present to those seeking education in formats sanctioned by the government and society, an up-to-date vision of culture, to integrate the different cultural phenomena in a way that makes sense, and to synthesize culture in a way that has pedagogical value.
There is a certain special service that education renders to culture. It would be wrong to underestimate it, but scholars are yet to afford it the attention it deserves. Education is not just a crucial vehicle of cultural
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survivorship, a method to pass culture from generation to generation, one epoch to the other; it is also a powerful tool of shaping the whole "look” of culture in a society, its core set of values and ideas, its prevalent worldview. Which of the past and recent cultural phenomena are recognized as great achievements and unquestioningly made a part of the culture and a legacy for millions, and what remains on the sidelines of the cultural mainstream, is largely a matter of education.
The definitive aspect here is the choice of material offered for compulsory learning in both secondary schools and higher institutions. Certain gems from the common treasure-trove of human thought and creativity that were, by operation of the then-current educational standards and curricula, left outside the content of education for a long time, will eventually be known only to a small group of narrow specialists. If some of them do percolate into the public domain, it will be strictly by accident, and most likely, in that peculiar form that everything turns to when touched by sensation-seeking media writers. The same destiny awaits the works of music and literature and the works in natural sciences, sociology and humanities.
For a scientist or inventor, it means ultimate recognition to be mentioned in a schoolbook or at least a university textbook. If a discovery or achievement is not mentioned, it is by default denigrated to a lower cultural status no matter how highly the specialists think of it, and no matter how important or influential it may have been. It is understandable that only a limited amount of material can make it to the training curricula and textbooks. Their authors face a dilemma with many variables; there are difficult compromises to make every step of the way. Let’s take a secondary school textbook, for example. It has to be scientifically flawless and has to reflect the latest in what science has to say on the subject in question. On the other hand, it has to be good reading and reasonably easy to understand for students, despite the fact that so many of the newest scientific concepts and theories are quite unsuited to the learning process at secondary school level. Another challenge is to link the subjects together in a meaningful way, which is crucial for the consistency and level of detail of the learning material. It is also necessary to accommodate the mental stereotypes and existing pedagogical experience of teachers, parents’ sensibilities, the public opinion, and much more. And then the volume of knowledge accumulated in every branch of science represented in the school curriculum is just too huge. So certain concepts, ideas and theories have to be sacrificed, even completely ignored despite their great scientific
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significance, so as not to "overload” students with too much information. At the end of the day, the picture of science as painted by the schoolbook necessarily ends up severely abridged and even partially distorted.
In essence, the standards of general secondary education make the task of mastering the fundamentals of science subordinate to the more far-reaching objective of fostering the students’ worldview, promoting their personal development as "actors” of culture. In this sense, it would be fair to say that the mission of secondary schooling is to perform and impart a pedagogical synthesis of culture, guided by the need to provide a perfectly enabling environment for the constructive personal development of students. There is a system to this, and scientific rationale, but it is cemented by the integrated education science.
We understand pedagogical science as a system of knowledge on education, and education is defined by the Education Act of Belarus as "the process of teaching and learning in the interest of Man, society and the state, a process aimed at preserving, augmenting and transmitting knowledge to new generations, satisfying every person’s need for intellectual, cultural, moral and physical growth, and training qualified workforce for the economy and its every industry.” In relation to educational activity, all the "academic” scientific subjects and all the other areas of culture are nothing but suppliers of the material needed for educational work. We view the culling and meaningful welding of such material together as "pedagogical synthesis”.
If we view the sciences as a source of content for modern education, we must bear in mind that the knowledge previously built up within a science, and newly generated knowledge are rather different in their purpose. In this, the training of researchers is of particular interest to us. That training is not confined to postgraduate or doctoral study; it also includes the first graduate degree which, in its turn, relies on secondary schooling. Each of these education levels draws on its own "strata” of scientific knowledge. For graduate and doctoral students, conversance with the latest in scientific thought is absolutely essential, otherwise they will not be able to place their own purported original contribution to science into the right perspective, they will not be able to correctly determine the "weight”, solidity and relative value of the material they intend to make the subject of their dissertation. At the same time, graduate students are expected to possess solid knowledge of the fundamental precepts and tenets that make up the basis of their discipline of choice. Such knowledge, which the student is supposed to have gained in the pursuit of their first higher
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education degree, is an inevitable precondition of successful scientific research, but quality higher education must obviously be preceded by quality secondary schooling.
It is not necessary and, indeed, not possible to teach in secondary school the entire body of knowledge, ideas and their applications that has been amassed and continues to grow in any specific branch of science, let alone all sciences in their incomprehensible enormity. On the other hand, schooling should not impede access to scientific thought for students, such as by teaching knowingly outdated scientific material or by presenting certain precepts as axiomatic and impregnable that once used to be taken that way but have since been radically reconsidered.
But culture, to which secondary schooling is supposed to pave the way, goes far beyond science and includes many other significant fields of thought. The relations between science and those other fields in today’s world are characterized by duality: in some ways they are partners, in other ways, rivals. A fight is on for resources, status and general influence. In society, debates never cease on the subject of values, goals and the adequate means to achieve them. The curriculum and the whole setup of secondary schooling today is a reflection on the current "balance of interests” and disposition of forces in society and its cultural domain. Secondary school presents to students a certain image of their society’s contemporary culture, and thus influences the formation of their mentality and world outlook. That influence is not straightforward and does not deprive students of choice. Family, the social milieu, and the media also contribute to the formation. But school, both secondary and higher, still commands much authority when it comes to culture. The picture of the world it paints, the benchmark values it advocates, the ideals and practical advice it offers have the power of legitimacy, an officially recognized status, and this places a great deal of responsibility on those institutions and individuals whose job is to select and configure the content of institutionalized education today. With its lifelong continuity, its hierarchical structure, the innovative drive of many of its elements and processes, education operates as a powerful crucible of culture. While culture as it exists ultimately defines the content of education in general, education, as an ascending process in personal development, to a great extent determines the future state of culture, the spiritual and material foundations of life for the future society.
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