CC BY
10
DOI: 10.24234/wisdom.v17i1.436 Valeriya MELNIK, Tetiana V. ANDRUSHCHENKO, Oksana SUSHKO, Anna KOVALOVA, Tetiana I. ANDRUSHCHENKO, Svitlana HOLOVKO, Iryna RESHETOVA
POWER AS A FACTOR OF EDUCATIONAL AND SOCIOCULTURAL PROCESSES
The article is devoted to the analysis of the interaction of power and education. The authors disclose the presentation of meta-structures formed at the crossroads of education with other areas of social life. It is shown that the socio-educational movement, expressing the interests of society in interaction with the authorities, does not cover the whole variety of deep objective processes. The necessity of acquisition and transfer of experience from person to person, from generation to generation, becomes the most important vector of the process and contributes to the integration of various areas of social life. The purpose is to investigate the structure and functions of power in the context of educational and socio-cultural processes, to identify the most important trends in the evolution of power in education, to disclose the specifics of power relations, their role in the functioning and development of the society.
Keywords: power, education, society, violence, personality.
Abstract
Introduction
into question by representatives of the Frankfurt school and representatives of postmodern philosophy. Intense discussions are underway on the relationship between power and violence. Attempts to establish a climate of tolerance dramatically clash with the rise of fundamentalist tendencies. Moreover, in the context of globalization, in connection with the formation of the information society and the improvement of techniques for manipulating consciousness, the means and manifestations of domination are becoming more sophisticated and diverse. Meanwhile, not one of the existing approaches to
In connection with the general complication of the social system, the tasks of its maintenance and improvement become relevant, that is, problems related to power, management of society, organization and self-organization. Recent decades have been marked by an unprecedented increase in interest in the phenomenon of power. The problem of power is especially acute in light of the ideal of the liberation of man. The axioms of classical rationalism, declaring the unity of reason (knowledge) and freedom, were called
power (individualistic, normative, structural-functionalist, psychological and others) provides a holistic, all the more, comprehensive understanding of it. The interaction of power and education has become crucial for the future of our being. Recently, various aspects of power relations in education, in the educational process, in the field of education have received coverage in the works of representatives of various philosophical sciences and philosophical directions. The ideas of M. Horkheimer, T. Adorno, M. Foucault, J. Derrida, J. Baudrillard, J. Deleuze, P. Freire, J. Habermas, and other prominent representatives of Western post-non-classical philosophy, organically fusing the topic of power with the problems of science and education, rethought and developed by famous authors: Viktoruk E., Matvienko T., Kravchenko O. Being a factor in educational and socio-cultural processes, power turns out to be an integral condition, prerequisite and means of social progress. Progress is understood as a development from simple to complex, from lower to higher, expansion of the scale of the phenomenon. Almost all classics and modern authors agree that social progress implies an increase in the degree of human freedom, humani-zation of law and politics, objective growth of needs and human opportunities, primarily to technological, economic, sociocultural, but also other changes. It is easy to see that the progressive development of education and science is implicitly contained in any of these aspects. The concept of social progress is largely intersected with concepts of cultural progress. Accordingly, referring to the influence of power on all spheres of society, one can trace this influence in accordance with the specified directions. Education aims to enrich a person with knowledge and liberate, and the improvement of power is means
emancipation, on the personal level and on the macro-social.
Development
The power relations that organize the educational process contribute to the assimilation, accumulation and transformation of knowledge and skills in accordance with specific goals, requirements, standards. The primary means of exercising power, of course, remain physical and moral violence, coercion in various forms, brute physical strength. The pace of development of power is directly related to the increased activity of subjects of education who are actively involved in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in the transformation of the world, other people and themselves. The unity of the moral and educational process was shown by S. Hessen (1913), who understood freedom as the ontological (not just sociological) basis for the interaction between teacher and student. The consequence of this approach is attention to the method, but not to the factual side of the matter, not to knowledge, which is always relative. The task is to introduce the personality to the culture, to make it capable of independently making decisions, acquiring and disseminating knowledge, apply the method. The principle formulated by Hessen (1913) is also well known: "in education, discipline is realized through freedom, and freedom through the law of duty" (p. 196). Thus, morality fits into education at the level of the deepest ontological regularity, not through a set of prohibitions, but through freedom, which is inseparable from morality, regardless of specific historical conditions. The phenomenological approach allows overcome the limitations of narrow empiricism, give the concept evidence of
necessity and universality.
The expansion and improvement of production, ensuring the effectiveness of the process of obtaining knowledge and skills are influenced by power production, is largely transformed into an experimental and training laboratory, more precisely, in a network of information structures. In a situation where information becomes the main product, goods and condition of production, it is impossible to reduce the relationship between people to those production relations that prevail in the era of industrial society. Informational, communicative interactions have a pedagogical (teacher-student) component, regardless of the will and consciousness of themselves participants in the process.
The educational power, which formalizes, holds and improves pedagogical interaction, accordingly complicates the structures of society, adds social roles, activities, institutional ties, etc. The man turns out to be superfluous in the conditions of a traditional political organization because individuality, originality cancelled by levelling violence by the state or other subjects of power. Ultimately, hierarchical structure domination leads to the extinction of society since it is difficult to implement the creative potential of an individual or social groups. Only a change in the principle of organization of society to nonviolent, non-suppressive, dialogical can ensure the advancement of mankind to the next, higher stage of historical development (Nietzsche, 1990).
The special importance of pedagogical power at this stage of development of society can be illustrated with simple but vivid examples. Making a person live long is much more difficult than awakening in him a free desire for long life. Violence is not effective in the treatment and in skilled education. Education designed to enrich a
person with knowledge and liberate him. In the 18th century, it became real social progress. Pedagogical power is not only influenced by other types of power, but, as was shown above, it itself has an opposite effect on them. It is the ideal of power relations. Power creates, generates objects of cognition, and draws up the entire educational space.
The need to acquire and transfer experience from person to person, from generation to generation, becomes the most important vector of the historical process. However, experience covers all areas of a social being. It's not just about production and about cognitive processes, but also about political, moral experience, aesthetic and any other. The area of contact between education and the political sphere, their interpenetration and mutual transition becomes, of course, educational power. She not only sets a certain pedagogical space, its boundaries, objects, processes taking place in it but also, in a certain way, modifies political power, becomes a point of its growth and progressive transformations. Let us turn, for example, to the topic of education in a multicultural world. Exactly traditional political power was a prerequisite for antidemocratic pedagogical ethnocentrism (be it outright racism-chauvinism or mild forms of discrimination and segregation). However, modern challenges, today's imperatives of cross-cultural or intercultural education corresponds to the form of power that we consider pedagogical (Viktoruk, 2004, p. 226). It is she who, not being total in her direction, creates favourable conditions for interethnic dialogue in pedagogical practice. Meanwhile, globalization and the universalization of education are the second most important feature of its evolution. Exactly, it is a free moral ideal that is part of the structure of pedagogical power along with traditional normative complex, which is its
essential feature that provides the ability to maintain orderliness pedagogical space despite its multipolarity. Pedagogical power helps a little Japanese and true Chinese their potential in the European educational space without prejudice to anyone. Pedagogical power allows not to ignore the presence of national minorities for the sake of like-minded monocultural education, but at the same time maintain the principle of discipline and structurally organized integrity. Multicultural education is the first step towards a tolerant, multicultural society, towards a new statehood and some new nationalities, whose structure should already be far from the classical scheme domination-subordination and begins to change in the direction of the model "Teacher-student". From the system of antagonistic classes, united generations, competing professional groups, etc., nationality is being transformed into an educational continuum, where any groups, whether it be different generations, professional groups or any or other, are connected by teacher-student relations.
It is legitimate to indicate as another feature of the evolution of education its economic feasibility since here we are faced not so much with a pronounced trend, how many with a range of persistent problems (for example, in complete compliance of the education system with the demands of the economy, the dissonance between the goals of the individual and the expectations of society, etc.).
Way out of this continuously deepening crisis is seen in the fact that the economy transforms into a post-economy with a more pronounced cognitive, and therefore, the educational component. The latest phenomena, such as cognitive capitalism, triple spiral, increasing significance of horizontal interactions, have been pointed out quite thoroughly. The teacher-student relationship becomes for the economic system as
attributive as the producer-consumer relationship, or "Director - subordinate". The scientific and educational content of the economy and the economic content of the educational process associated with complicating the nature of the organization of this educational and economic space. The factor shaping this space is pedagogical power. After all, the usual patterns of domination, coercion dictate become inapplicable in a virtualized economy, its increasing dynamism, and perhaps most importantly, in the face of the complexity of interpersonal relationships, corporate ethics and system pluralization values. Post-economy, like any other social, economic or value-normative system, cannot function outside the organizer fields of power. But this power can no longer be effective if it has not radically changed its nature. The director's power is replaced by the power of the ideal, standard, expert, power-ministry, "the situation of justice as the use of force universal into the space of freedom", that new type of social interactions, which we designated as pedagogical power (Freyre, 2017). The moral obsolescence of traditional "dictate" coercive power in relation to education, I have to admit Maggie Melo. "The formation of power as a social control over power and over education is complicated by the fact that people who somehow control education and power themselves become involved in these institutions. Borders between the "ruling minority" and the "creative minority" are transparent and blurred. It turns out that some decision-makers must control themselves. Of course, the idea of separation of power has long been known. You can follow the path of organizing competing groups, mutually checking and evaluating each other to create a system of "checks and balances", with which you could somehow organize social control in the field of the education authority. The education system
itself acts as such "checks and balances". To overcome the crisis phenomena, civil freedom is required "in all forms of educational activity, contributing to the formation and development of creative abilities of all its participants; not only among units but almost among the masses, for such an indispensable requirement of culture and knowledge-based expanded reproduction real living conditions of people..." (Melo, 2018). Such freedom implies the absence of strict regulation in terms of forms, means, methods of educational work, as well as communication with local forms of self-government, which implies the existence of a developed civil society. In our opinion, this perspective fully meets the imperative of expanding and strengthening pedagogical power in society. The root of the crisis is the suppression of its traditional political power, based on coercion, on imposing another's will. In this situation, only the formation can help wide power space based on the principles of striving for self-denial of power to overcome domination in all its real and possible forms. In the history of society, a moment comes when further social progress is impossible without decisive changes in the most fundamental principles of social organization institutions. The Institute of Education, despite all the crisis phenomena, has specific experience in modifying power relations, which would be useful to extend to other areas of public life. Based on the ideas of Kravchenko, as well as the work of other sociologists, educators and philosophers who comprehend the evolution of social institutions in the context of the general laws of social development, methodologically useful to give an idea of meta-educational structures emerging at the intersection of education with diverse social fields. Such structures there are many whose significance depends on the specifics of a particular society. Recall at least
the role of language standard and language education in countries hosting large migrant flows, the importance of knowledge of English to advance in the modern world, especially in an Anglophone environment that captures the planet.
An analysis of current trends in social development shows that the future of statehood is associated with its final transformation into a scientific-educational and educational system (one of the eternal ideals of socio-philosophical thought). Informatization, not militarization and not even the world division of labour is now becoming a decisive factor of globalization. The dissemination of knowledge and technology, including training, ahead of the pace and the importance of the distribution of goods and services, and even more, demographic changes and labour migration of the population of Ukraine suggests new rules for students. Knowledge and skills easily overcome not only the state but also cultural and geographical, regional and economic, confessional, class, gender and age boundaries.
Live generational connection, free imitation of the teacher, action according to a specific behavioural model that cannot be reduced to the transfer of information, to text, to knowledge, Kant and Mendelssohn fits into the pedagogical structure. Free imitation of the teacher allows the student to be in that element, in that reality, which is understood before he's not yet capable of the fully reflect and be rather than seem and is unlikely to understand ever properly whether he will remain in the position of an external observer who assimilates knowledge verbally or visually but not practically. Kantian teaching itself provides a quite reliable foundation for pedagogical power as conditions conducive to the transformation of both political and religious, and other social institutions in the direction of progress of freedom. The best about
this is evidenced by the very famous Kantian definition of self: "...This is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance" (Kant, 1966). However, the presumption of the unity of reason for all cultures and civilizations can retain its humanistic content only if this mind is human (from the point of view of Kant, as you know, pure mind is practical, moral). However, in the current technocratic context, instrumental understanding of rationality when knowledge is substituted information, happiness - pleasure, etc., such a broad wording may already be insufficient. That is why "determination", "courage" and "minority" (also "laziness", "cowardice") should not be considered just like some optional metaphors, analogies, art images, but as fundamentally important signs, behind which the main thing is hidden the content is the intuition of a person who is not reducible to "reason". This intuition can be substantially explained in the concept of teacher-student interaction and, of course, pedagogical power with all its specifics and irreducibility to political power. Moreover, functionally pedagogical power here occupies a place precisely political power, and partly that which is immanent to a religious community, so say, theocratic power, more precisely, confessional and priestly. The tendency to replace the old relations of domination and submission with a more progressive form of organization, in this case, is obvious, and its trend can be interpreted as progress. As the history of the twentieth century has shown, like many other enlighteners, Kant was mistaken and seriously inferior in insight to
Mendelssohn, and Cohen and, possibly, I. Herder (Rodriguez, 2013). Teaching Power - this is not only a factor that brings a person into a state of freedom, but also a factor supporting this condition in the future, preventing its degradation to totalitarianism and all those phenomena that have been thoroughly investigated representatives of the Frankfurt School, and then representatives of many other philosophical directions. A peculiar paraphrase of the Kantian position, the words of E. Fromm sound: "The human brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most people -still in stone. In most cases, a person is not mature enough to be independent, reasonable, objective. A man is unable to bear that he is left to his own strength, that he himself must give meaning to his life, and not get it from some higher power, so people need idols and myths" (Tardif, 2005). It is difficult to agree with such a position. Fromm is certainly right when speaking of existential-personal aspects of being, about the fears and hopes of a lonely human, but such a model does not work on the macro-social, on the social ontological level, because it does not allow us to comprehend history otherwise than in terms of the 18th century: "matured", "not matured", etc. People are moving forward with ideals, not idols. Thus, the whole history of Western thought can regard as a constant advancement of the imperative of rationality and continuous attempts to limit the power of the mind, incessant doubts about his power. Let us turn to the formulation of the universal imperative: "If you want to take power over everything, give power to your mind! You will command many if the mind commands you" (Paechter, 2011). Today, appeals of this kind are often touted as metaphysical, totalitarian, metaphysically oriented, metanarrative, etc.. However such interpretations themselves de-
pend on the chosen coordinate system, impose dogmatic reading of the texts of ancient and even later classics. Eurocentrism, scientism, universalism, unrestrained optimistic mood are criticized. However, criticism of the modernist project by postmodernists, anti-globalists or religious authors is accompanied by a steady reaction that does not allow those who speak about the decline of the modernist project to be disappointed in the possibilities of science and technology. Analysis critical theories, in particular the texts of M. Horkheimer, T. Adorno, E. Fromm, shows that one way or another, it is always associated with critical consideration power relations, establishes the connection of the negative consequences of a different kind of progress (primarily technical) with the preservation or even consolidation of relations of domination and submission (Fromm, 2006). Violence, Coercion, Dictatorship are thought of as the main obstacles or disappointments with which confronts the theory of progress. It is logical to assume that it is overcoming traditional forms of violence in society and replacing them with those relationships which were designated as pedagogical power can serve as modernization, updating the classical ideas of social progress, the salvation of faith in progress. "...Violence and non-violence can also be interpreted as various stages of a single process. In terms of transition from one stage to the other, from violence to non-violence, our time is critical when a qualitative shift forward is required, equivalent to a change in the foundations of life. Speech is not it is about a one-time or complete elimination of violence - violence has irreparably deep roots in historical and psychological experience, in human ontology. This is a qualitative change in the vector of conscious human efforts - individual and, in particular, collective
and social" (Paechter, 2011).
The intensification and diversification of information flow, as well as an increase in the mobility of related structures (including the educational system, professional and academic associations, "Teacher-Student" role relationships) and people themselves, is a very important manifestation of an increase in the degree of freedom of a person and society as a whole as an integral criterion social progress. The reverse process is also possible, extremely negative when political power can absorb pedagogi-cally. In the long historical perspective under the guise of external progress (prosperity training institutions, budget growth and technical equipment) may take place fundamental regression leading to the degradation of the education system, and then of the whole society, to quasi-science, to quasi-formation, finding expression, in particular, in the catastrophic onset of testing, ratings and them similar trends. M. Foucault considers the education system in terms of political power and not pedagogical power. According to Foucault's theory, the role of universities is increasing precisely because they are agents of power (Fuko, 2010). The school exam becomes a sacred practice and, at the same time, documented discourse. On the contrary, Pyati-gorsky says that a child is an independent person and that in the Jewish educational institution (as in the entire Jewish environment), no places of competition, public evaluations. Here one must also remember the special cultural significance of the Jewish community in the development of world science and education in general, about its specific gravity and impact on world history. In our opinion, Pyatigorsk speaks of completely different power, also related to the educational process. This power is an alternative to the one along which it moves the
world education system, including official university. But education as an ontological, personal, existential-personal, and also a social phenomenon transforming the whole foundation on which it is formed: the state, politics, church, economy - the framework is growing official education system, seeks to transcend it. Foucault and Pyatigorsky, as well as representatives of European humanistic pedagogy, speak of different types of power or, perhaps, of different stages of its evolution (Matvienko, 2012).
Conclusion
In general, considering and evaluating power relations in the diachronic aspect, we can state the following. Power evolving from a form hopelessly political and at the same time pedagogical-ly hopeless in form, in the future pedagogical and, at the same time, politically promising. Globalization and informatization, scientific and technological progress do not guarantee the advancement of humanity along the path of genuine democracy to the ideals of freedom, justice, comprehensive development of personality. A deep transformation of all is needed interhuman relations, the most important of which are relations dominance and submission and which should acquire a different character, preserving, however, organizational, restrictive and, at the same time, incentive nature. Power provides the integrity of the human person and the integrity of society to which the individual belongs. Provides familiarity with tradition and, at the same time, encourages moving forward. If traditional political power can reduce a person to the position of a slave, then educational power does not allow this by definition, as it is mainly rooted in culture, dialogue, in the cultural anthropological dimension of our being.
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