CC BY
43
THE CIVILIZATIONAL ASPECT OF DEVELOPMENT OF PATRIOTIC EDUCATION
I. D. Lushnikov
Patriotism is a universal human value. Every nation has a historical attachment to their land, the feeling of involvement in the destiny of their country, and readiness to protect it. Not a single nation in the world would be indifferent or would have ill feelings to their native land and ethnic culture. Patriotism is a genetic quality of the people manifested in different times and different nations under the influence of different motives and in various forms.
History shows that when the great, as it is, phenomenon of “patriotism” closes on the national interests, it may turn into nationalism which, in its turn, turns into chauvinism under the guise of superiority over everything that is different or alien, which often results in sufferings and troubles for nations. With the potential means capable of destroying life on Earth growing, the time of prosperity of the traditional, local patriotism, closed to national interests and separated from the interests, mentality, and way of life of other nations, has ended. It is time for a transition from national patriotism to national-civilizational patriotism.
We would like to draw the reader’s attention to the very notion of patriotism. In the national spiritual culture, patriotism has traditionally been understood as, first and foremost, love for one’s Motherland. One cannot say, however, that the understanding of patriotism with a focus on love of one’s Motherland has been historically fully justified. It is easy to use the psychological notion of “love”, but it cannot be empirically and convincingly recorded in the evaluation of such a lifechanging phenomenon for the country as patriotism. Priority should be given to the moral feeling of responsibility to the Motherland for the destiny of the Motherland as a steady result of character building, rather than to the psychological feeling of love capable of easily evading. In our opinion, patriotism is allegiance to the homeland based on the conscious responsibility for the destiny of one’s country, on the love to one’s people, and on one’s personal practical activities for the benefit of the Motherland.
This understanding of patriotism unites its different conceptual sides as a spiritual phenomenon: the value-based side (homeland as the leading conceptual value), the moral side, acting in unity with the mind and convictions of the person (conscious responsibility for the destiny of the country), the emotional side (love for one’s people), and the action-based side (practical action for the benefit of the Motherland). Their synthesis is represented in the notion of “allegiance to the homeland” contrary to treason, betrayal, damage and harm to the interests of one’s country. The leading criterion of identification of patriotism is practical action for the benefit of the Motherland.
According to the definition of A.A. Gritsanov, civilization is “one of the heterogeneous states of the society in its change in real historical time” [3, p. 1203]. A separately taken civilization is a relatively closed, self-sufficient public organism - this idea of civilization became popular in science in the XIX-XX centuries. As a subject of the civilization it lives in, the nation living in it,
213
assimilating its way of life, and spiritually powered by it, is simultaneously its keeper, protector and creator of the national-ethnic culture, its basic values. In every epoch the nation introduces new values into its own civilization, continuously developing it and enriching the contents of what is protected, defended and valued by it. The contents of patriotic education develop organically with the development of civilization.
Our epoch is no exception. A specific feature of our time is the openness of world space for mutual communication among nations. The growing information flows, and the emergence of increasingly advanced means of its high-speed transmission have a decisive impact on social-economic life, on man’s position up to full control of man’s life activities. Time dictates the vital need for the principles of openness in international affairs, and sincere peacefulness, accounting for the values of every civilization with its specific features and universally growing dignity of the individual and nations. As a response to it, as a need of the people’s spirit, the system of civilizational values must include justice, equality, respect for other people’s culture and its bearer - the individual. These values come to the fore in the development of the modern civilizations of all nations, in communication between peoples and states. They are designed to ensure peace and life on Earth - the only conditions of prosperity of the contemporary civilizations and, consequently, of human well-being. The predominant value-based orientations in the traditional meaning of patriotism are to be supplemented with new value-based orientations creating the extended, civilizational meaning of patriotism. Nationally closed patriotism should be transformed into a national-civilizational one.
These values are in good agreement with the specific features of the Russian civilization, with the mentality of the Russian man, with such traits of his character as conscientiousness, openness, and peacefulness. In this respect, Russian civilization has all grounds to capture the civilizational values of patriotism in the system of its relations with other nations, and to show the promising way of their unity and prosperity to other civilizations. These are not the ambitions of our people, but rather the need of progressive movement of all civilizations for the wellbeing of their own country and saving Earth’s civilization from growing threats. The civilizational values of patriotism, such as justice, equality and respect for what is different are the values of high level generalization. They may be formed in people only as a result of organized, conscious and continuous education since their childhood, when they gradually and consistently enter the axiosphere of the personality and become simple and natural in the life practice.
In December, 2013, we conducted research in the general educational organizations of the Vologda Region to determine the level of patriotic education of learners. The Internet-survey covered learners of the fourth, ninth and eleventh grades of all general education schools of the region: a total of 23,130 respondents. We developed a closed-type questionnaire to identify the value-patriotic orientations revealing themselves in knowledge, relations and personal practice as applied to different spheres of human social communication. One of the spheres was the sphere of “Nations of the World” when the student was placed into the position of a subject of international communication with the material comprehensible for his age. One of the questions was related to knowledge, and another - to the attitude to the presented facts, while one more was to the personal
214
choice of the proposed kinds of practice. Every question had answers with a different value-based orientation: positive (patriotic), neutral and negative. This was identified as a result whose place in the individual’s consciousness is taken by the value-patriotic knowledge, value-patriotic relations, and value-patriotic practice. In the Nations of the World sphere of social communication, the topic of Fairytales of the Peoples of the World was selected for the 4th grade, Universal Human Values (Science) for the 9th grade, and Mutual Relations between Russia and Peoples of the World for the 11th grade.
The following conclusions can be drawn based on the results of the research: 1) with 4th grade students the patriotically significant knowledge, attitude and practice look relatively proportional and at a good level; 2) as the life problems faced by students with age (9th and 11th grades) objectively become more complicated, the disproportion between patriotically significant knowledge, attitude and practice grows; 3) at the same time, the results of the research show that even given the insufficiently organized and focused work with students of our school in instilling patriotically value-based attitudes to other peoples of the world in them, the positive knowledge, positive attitude, and choice of positive practical actions in every grade was above 50%. The susceptibility of our children, teenagers and adolescents to the fair, equal, respectful communication with other peoples of the world evidences the potential of civilizational development of patriotic education in our country.
References
1. Даль В. Патриотизм// Толковый словарь живого великорусского языка. - Т. III. - М.:
Госиздат,1956.
2. Апресян Р. Г. Патриотизм // Российская Педагогическая Энциклопедия. Т. 2.- М.:
Большая Российская энциклопедия, 1999.
3. Грицанов А. А. Цивилизация // Всемирная энциклопедия. Философия. - М., 2001.
4. Панченко А. М. Русская культура в конце Петровских времён. - Л., 1984.
5. Панченко А. М., Гончаров И. Ф., Судаков В. В. Русская цивилизация: Программа
учебного курса для 10-11 классов общеобразовательной школы. - СПб.; Вологда, 2001.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translations Bureau
215
