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ON THE WAY
TO PROFESSIONAL SELF-EDUCATION
N. А. Lobanov
1. The author put forward a hypothetical proposition: in 10-15 years the proportion of professional self-education to education received by attendance of lectures and seminars in the subsystem of main professional education in average will be 30% (or possibly an even higher value), and in the subsystem of additional professional education can grow up to around 50% of the total hours set forth in the training programs of professional education. This trend is expected to grow steadily. And this “silent revolution” will change the educational landscape.
2. In the broad sense of the term, self-education means the process of acquiring knowledge and skills through (by means of) self-study and observations. In the context of the discussed issues, for us the concept of “professional selfeducation” is of particular importance, which means a purposeful process of acquiring knowledge, skills and competencies through (by means of) self-study and observations according to the specific educational programs approved by the employer, or according to the curriculum of additional professional education institutions, agreed with the employer, for whom the learning process is organized.
Self-education is one of the oldest social institutions of the society that accompanies a person throughout his/her adult life. And we should not forget that self-education is the first and the oldest form of education (training, learning).
In the epistemological and historical contexts, there are two main motives of self-education: a need and a demand.
Self-education as a need. If we take the biblical tradition as a historical source, and the author considers the Bible to be a historical source, the first people on Earth - Adam and Eve - were the founders of self-study (self-learning). Let us study this historical source, “So, God expelled him (Adam - N.L.) from the Garden of Eden to cultivate the land, from which he had been taken.” [The Book of Genesis 1:23]. However, neither Adam nor Eve had a tutor, or textbooks or manuals describing how to cultivate the land. That is why for the first humans on Earth -Adam and Eve - self-education (self-learning) became an objective necessity of their own survival and procreation.
Self-education as a demand, as an informal institution of education, emerged in an era when the main areas of knowledge and practical activities necessary for the life of an individual and for the life of a community of people had been shaped. Since that time and up until the last quarter of the 20th century selfeducation had been developing as an individual demand of people that fulfilled a function of satisfaction of their various needs, including scientific and educational ones.
3. The search for innovative solutions that would open new opportunities for economic growth, technological breakthrough and social transformation, is, perhaps, the most relevant and discussed topic of the last decade. But often in our pursuit of new theoretical and empirical solutions we forget that we do not use the existing opportunities to the fullest extent, that many growth reserves lie “open” in traditional technologies, forms and methods of work. Professional self-education can become one of these growth reserves, capable of improving the professional potential of employees regardless of their area of activities in the context of lifelong
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education. Real information and technological prerequisites for this were developed at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries.
The ambitious tasks facing Russia in general, and its economy, in particular, set at least three important and interrelated goals for the system of education in the field of innovative development:
The first one - to improve the quality of training of students of secondary and higher professional education by bringing their level of competency from the viewpoint of their professionalism to the required level of competency needed in the real sector of the economy and the social sphere;
The second one - to raise the level of professional competence of the working population, and, primarily, in the areas of strategic importance for growth of the national economy and ensuring national security, in which the increment of professional knowledge tends towards spontaneous acceleration, and therefore updating professional knowledge is a necessary condition for the effectiveness of individual work and teamwork;
And the third one - as a consequence of the first two - to ensure continuous reproduction of the working population with a necessary and sufficient level of professional competence, and, especially, in the sectors of strategic importance for the growth of national economy and provision of national security.
Practical implementation of this latter problem is directly and immediately connected with the additional professional education (training). The established forms and methods of additional education (training) are well known, and many of them have proven to be productive. However, in the institutional practice of additional education (training), professional self-education turned out to be on the periphery of scientific interests and practical use1.
4. We believe that over the next 10-15 years professional self-education will become an independent plan and account form of educational activity, and will become one of the important characteristics (indicators) of the evaluation of educational institutions providing additional professional education. This form of educational activity will also touch upon the subsystem of core (basic) professional education. We believe that in the next 10-15 years the number of students in the subsystem of additional professional training, including advanced training and retraining, will correlate with the number of students in the primary subsystem of professional education at a ratio of 3:1. And we believe that there are not only sufficient bases for this, but also an urgent need.
First of all, the market of services of primary professional education to-date has been developed in general. The expected changes in the coming years will be mainly related to structural changes in the field of professional specialization within the framework of secondary vocational and higher professional education institutions: emergence of new areas of specialization, unification of several professions, cease of training in certain professional areas, etc. Quantitatively, the market of services of primary professional education will not grow, moreover for the last several years it has been significantly reduced, whereas the market of additional education (learning) has an objective growth trend. It is this market of
1 Unfortunately, professional self-education, as a form of additional professional education, was also not reflected in the “Concept of long-term social and economic development of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2020”. At the same time it can be an important resource factor in the transition to the economy of innovative development.
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educational services that today and in the future will determine the pace of our progress on the path of innovative development.
Secondly, it is quite obvious that the market for additional educational services in most sectors of the economy and in the social sphere, in the form, in which it has been shaped to the present time, in no way meets the objectives of modernizing the country. And although it will undoubtedly grow, in the nearest future, and more than likely, in the upcoming years, this educational sector will not allow the majority of the working population to improve their qualifications, to undergo retraining, etc., at least once every five years. This can be explained not only by the economic opportunities, but also by the impossibility to rather quickly train enough competent professionals who would be able to work in the innovative educational environment of additional professional education1.
Obviously, we need a new paradigm of additional professional training, including advanced training and retraining, where professional self-education will become one of the leading forms of the educational process. In an era of escalating the institutional forms of professional training and development of various forms of additional education, the need for professional self-education for a large part of the working population becomes a social and economic imperative, a prerequisite for preserving their social status.
5. To a large extent creation of the state and corporate subsystem of professional self-education could overcome the barriers standing in the way of ensuring the reproduction of the necessary and sufficient number of competent professionals. For this purpose it is necessary to abandon the existing social and economic stereotypes inherited from the era of before-innovation development. One of them is in the fact that, despite the general awareness of the importance of a professional self-education institute, as a practically unlimited economic and social resource, the attitude of the government and the society to professional selfeducation remains the same - this is a form of satisfaction by a person of his/her own interests1 2. Of course, nowadays professional self-education continues to bear a social function of satisfaction of individual interests, but the results of these interests, often overcoming the intellectual membrane of personal interests, acquire public importance and give rise to new social and technical initiatives. More often it gets the features of professional education. Perhaps the manifestation of personal professional interest within the framework of lifelong professional selfeducation largely takes place due to the majority of recent and many present discoveries. We have yet to realize the place and the role of this form of education in the 21st century. But it is obvious that self-education is moving from the area of “amateur activity” to the area of professional labor.
I believe that the problem of transition to professional self-education should become a subject of the State Targeted Program.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translations Bureau
1 Experience shows that the vast majority of professors and teachers employed in the subsystem of core (basic) professional education are not ready to work efficiently in the subsystem of additional professional education. There is an urgent need to create specialized centers for preparation of teachers for the subsystem of additional professional education.
2 It is typical that until the mid-XX century the word “self-education” in lexicographical sources was associated only with the pre-professional education.
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