CC BY
38
LIFELONG EDUCATION:
PEDAGOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY
R. Z. Safieva А. N. Faleev
As an integral part of the general social process, the educational system plays a most important role in human life, as almost one-third of a person’s life is very closely connected with this social system. Being the communicative as collaborative activities of a student and a teacher, education does not limit itself only by the translation and transfer of knowledge. It is necessarily connected with the upbringing and development of a student's personal qualities and with his or her formation and development as a person.
The modern world has entered a particular stage of its existence where the foundations of post-industrialism with new media and communications systems have been laid, thereby considerably changing the entire social reality. The Individualization of a person, and the formation of a multidimensional personality, is becoming more and more powerful and a person at his or her own discretion is able to choose between different modes of expression. All of this suggests a fundamentally different type of the society in which partnership is based on dialogue and mutual openness, thereby having far-reaching consequences that affect all social spheres of modern life, including education. By the creation of new social conditions, in which the constant changes in information technology radically alter all types of communications and relationships between people, the above changes provide a real opportunity to pose questions about the need to reform the social institution of education in accordance with the requirements of the new society - the informed society. The present social and cultural situation seriously affects addressing and solving this problem. Its core consists in the gap between the “traditional” education, designed for a certain stability of society and the gradual flow of social processes in it, as well as a rapidly changing and developing information-driven world.
It is necessary to remember that in the last century a significant contribution to finding a way out of this situation was made by many Western scientists, philosophers and specialists. Reference may be made, for example, to works of Alvin Toffler - author of the books The Culture Consumers and The Schoolhouse in the City. In these works he quite clearly and definitively discusses the dangers of social and cultural discontinuities. By titling one of his works Future Shock, the author sees a way out of the crisis, that being, on the one hand, in increase of the person's ability to adapt, and on the other hand, his or her ability to control the pace of change. In this regard, he sets a task to develop a “survival strategy”, in which the central task of education during a period of accelerating information change, which accumulates so quickly that an expert does not have time to monitor changes in the narrowest area, includes the development of the human capacity for adaptation. In the work Future Shock, recognition of the role of education is combined with a strong dissatisfaction with the existing system. According to the author, industrialism has created mass education, in which the administrative hierarchy of education (regulation, lack of individualization, a rigid system of
389
division into classes or groups, grades, the authoritarian role of a teacher) repeated the model of industrial bureaucracy and made education an effective tool to adapt to the industrial society. School not only gave some knowledge of facts, it provided adaptation to the lifestyle which the child had to assume. In this regard, Toffler offers to create at each school “Tips of the future”, tasks which should include changing the focus of education towards future and changing the organizational structure of the educational system. School, as a sort of a factory, should be replaced by a new form, where instead of the current system of classroom teaching - one teacher and an unchanging class composition - the following pattern should be used: one student and several teachers, or several teachers and a group of students.
Toffler also proposed to revolutionize these programs, directing them to the challenges of the future, by way of providing more time to study logic, aesthetics and philosophy, which provide the most adequate tools and rich potential for the development of independent, critical thinking. Not all students have to study the same subjects. Nevertheless, they should have a set of generic skills, the skills necessary for human communication and social integration, including, firstly, an ability to learn (“an illiterate person of tomorrow is not a person who does not know how to read, but he, who did not receive adequate knowledge to know how to read”; secondly, an ability to establish contacts; thirdly, an ability to make choices in accordance with one’s own value orientations. Education should not develop a rigid system of values. Rather, it should be focused on the gradual and systematic organization of formal and informal student activities, which will help students to identify and check their own values. An ability to look ahead plays a major role in adaptation. That is why it is necessary, together with history courses, to introduce courses of the future in the educational institutions.
These positions at the conceptual level today should be clarified and added in a manner by which the requirements specified above cannot be fulfilled without purposeful and consistent implementation of the new approach in pedagogical practices, based on the transition from “knowing” to “personality creating” pedagogy. A solution to this problem actualizes a shift from the traditional, “once and forever” system of education to a new one in which an ability to acquire knowledge, use it, systematically renovate it and increase it throughout one’s life plays one of the most important roles. This means that in an information society education cannot be completed at any particular stage, but should last a lifetime, and, in fact, become a way of life for a person who constantly increases and updates his or her knowledge.
We do not seek to develop a coherent program for dealing with the specific problems of lifelong education, because it requires special work. However, it must be emphasized that any of the possible options of such a program involve as well as a discussion of the essential principles, components that determine the structure of the system of lifelong education in order to ensure its invariance, viability and effectiveness. In our opinion, these essential principles for constructing the educational process, which lies at the foundation of lifelong education as an integrated system, include the humanization and humanitarization of the content of education.
390
The humanization of modern education is based upon an emphasis of a person as the highest value and the process of training and education as a process of personality formation and development. Today society is becoming directly dependent on the unlocking the creative potential of every individual, as the highest stage of development can be reached only by a society that, along with other indicators, is characterized by the a level of independence of its members and the development of their ability to self-improve and self-educate. In modern times only freely and critically thinking individuals, who have the right and ability to independently solve complex problems, can become the true catalysts of sociohistorical development under the conditions of constantly updating information networks and technologies that transform the entire socio-cultural environment in which the human activity is being carried out. This vision actualizes the organizational problem of educational work in school and in higher education which is based on the principle of the individualization of the pedagogical process through special training technologies. The whole mechanism of learning should encourage the development of a student, by forming his or her ability to independently penetrate into the essence of phenomena, not only from point of view of a book, and to feel as a person in the fullest sense of this word.
The humanization of the content of education involves the development of a personality’s humanitarian culture; the development of a person’s beliefs; an ability to understand another person; and an ability to perceive and respect the other human cultures. In modern conditions, the problem of humanizing education serves mainly as a problem of the saturation and enrichment of the educational disciplines with value-based content. However, it is impossible to do this without the inclusion of ethics course in the curricula, which studies the spiritual and moral aspects of personal development and public existence, by means of a theoretical understanding of human experience, taking into account its diversity and contradictions. In other words, first of all, it means teaching a special ethics course, and secondly, the widespread inclusion of all humanitarian disciplines without exception - sociology, psychology, education and culture.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translations Bureau
391
