Through The Diversity Of Paradigms And Models To Optimal Dagestan Education System

Abstract

The significantly increased role of education in society considerably complicates the search for and finding an effective educational policy. The concept of long-term socio-economic development of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2020 determined the strategy of innovative development and the core principles of current educational policy. The strategic goal of the state policy in the field of education was to increase the availability of quality education that meets the requirements for innovative development of the economy. The regional education system of Dagestan in recent decades has been under the ambiguous pressure of globalization trends, therefore, several models of education acted at once in the educational process of the republic. The primary objective of philosophers of education, theorists of pedagogy, and, in particular, federal state and republican Dagestan policy is to search for and find an education system that is adequate to objective cultural and national realities. The protection of the cultural and religious identity of the Dagestanis and the preservation of the republic itself in its original format depends on the solution to this problem. The education system and educational policy are considered from the point of view of their dependence on the cultural component. The article provides a historical and philosophical excursion into European education, namely the intuitive-discursive, exegetical-apologetic, rational-experimental, and existential-personological paradigms. The cultural background is analyzed through the prism of modern humanitarian, polytechnical and sociocultural theories.

Keywords: Culture, educational paradigm, globalization, regional educational space

Introduction

The essential quality of the educational space as a subsystem of the cultural space is the production of spiritual products in the human communication process. In the last two centuries, the world has become culture dependent. The development of the economy, society, and education turned out to be commensurate with cultural processes, primarily to the religious, ethical, and ethnic characteristics of the regions. Despite the globalization tendencies, which are unifying, spiritual and civilizational determinants divide the world educational space into qualitatively different global and regional dimensions. In the regional dimension, the ethnocultural components of education manifest themselves both as development factors and as its obstacles.

Problem Statement

The ethnocultural components of education have always been significant for multinational and multi-confessional Russia, quite apart from the fact that ethnocultural originality in Soviet times was characterized by deepening sharp contradictions. The vector of education was determined by the ideological direction of the state policy without discussions about culturally derived models and paradigms, the number of which in modern pedagogical science is dozens (Zalibekova, 2019).

Research Questions

The search for an optimal system of regional education involves several issues. Ideas about the normative nature of culture for a person, the cultural dimension of his activity, and the cultural conformity of education can be derived from an empirical understanding of the content of historically established education paradigms. By the generally accepted division of history into the epochs of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Modern and Contemporary times, Romanenko (2003) identifies the corresponding educational paradigms: intuitive-discursive, exegetical-apologetic, rational-experimental, and existential-personological. Their cultural background is hidden by the very nominations of paradigms, which focus on the dominant aspects of the content of education. Some culturologists and philosophers distinguish other paradigms: humanitarian, polytechnical, and sociocultural (Dobrenkov & Nechaev, 2003).

Until the end of the Enlightenment, the humanitarian educational paradigm dominated, according to which education was focused on the study of man and his spiritual destiny. This culturally conditioned paradigm has found an adequate embodiment in the coexistence of secular and spiritual education. The polytechnical paradigm existed in the era of modern times, during which the education of a person prepared him for a profession that was to become his life's work. The purpose of education was to teach a person to master technology and be able to effectively use its advantages.

In the scientific literature, there are other bases for the classification of paradigms. Bilalov (2015) puts the historical forms of cognitive cultures as a basis for understanding the stages of education in general and Dagestan education in particular. The cultural orientation of education paradigms has always manifested itself. Culture in antiquity, religion in the Middle Ages (as the main culture-forming factor both in Europe and the East) developed education within the framework of their institutions. Gradually formed Christian and Muslim pedagogy. The Renaissance began to distinguish between religious and secular education. This, however, did not mean the departure of religion from the educational process. There was a specialization in the more complicated educational space. The modern secular type of education, which absorbed the fullness and richness of secularized culture, was formed during the heyday of the Enlightenment. The goal of education was a person and the formation of his universal culture, in which a free person would develop as an educated and educated person, creatively creating himself and the world. The human personality moved to the center of education with the desire to “introduce the younger generation to the national culture, language, and literature” (Dolzhenko, 1995, p. 29). With the most profound social trends of the era, aimed at shaping the values of a free citizen, religious education also functioned in parallel in accordance with bourgeois slogans about freedom of conscience. The ideological orientation of ethnonational education becomes diverse: Religious values, scientific and philosophical concepts.

In the new system, appropriate educational models were formed with the leading role of liberal concepts of education. Democratic pedagogical concepts were also popular, meeting the interests of the masses. Diderot, Rousseau, and other thinkers of the era advocated an enlightened state policy of the leading powers in the interests of the people, and Jan Comenius proposed a truly folk pedagogy, covering the entire human race (1982). The ideas of humanism, universal education, the unity of upbringing and education in it, the study of the native language, and other pedagogical and philosophical messages contributed to the emergence of several culturally conditioned autonomous models of education in the next three centuries. The first educational model concentrated training and education on introducing a person to all the riches of knowledge, giving priority to the scientific and technical direction. A somewhat opposite vector was the educational model with an emphasis on social and moral activity. The third educational model was aimed at developing a person's universal logical thinking (Kuszhanova, 1998).

There is controversy regarding terminological diversity and the relationship between the terms “paradigm”, “model”, “concept”, “theory”, etc. This article uses the term “paradigm” as the most generalized strategy of education, the implementation of which is carried out in various tactical pedagogical concepts and theories, that is, models. Today, the main paradigms of education include cognitive, personality-developing, practice-oriented, cultural, and functionalist. Modern paradigms appear as deployment and generalization of the considered concepts of the Renaissance and Enlightenment into a nationally oriented educational space, which are then adopted from state to state. Russia and its regions, to one degree or another, have designated aspects in their educational culture. In the cognitive paradigm, education acts as a learning process, and accordingly, the models of this paradigm, characteristic of the 20th century, emphasize the goals and objectives of learning. The first paradigm could be called scientistic since it is aimed at developing a scientific picture of the world in students. Science becomes the ideal not only for education but for the whole culture. Social, cultural, and educational changes in Russian society aimed at the transition to a society “from a relatively stable phase to a dynamic phase of development, a closed society to an open one, a totalitarian society to a civil one, from an industrial to a post-industrial, informational one” (Tazbieva, 2009, p. 16).

Purpose of the Study

Practice-oriented and functionalist paradigms aim education at professionalization and training for production. Their essence was expressed in the Concept of Long-Term Socio-Economic Development of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2020, which determined the strategy of innovative development of Russia and the key principles of current educational policy. The strategic goal of the state policy in the field of education was to increase the availability of quality education that meets the requirements for innovative development of the economy. With these paradigms, the noble attitudes of the personality-developing paradigm, and the enlightenment paradigm of education for the upbringing of a comprehensively developed personality are forgotten. These models form the educational system of technogenic culture, which is based on a pedagogical paradigm having the following characteristics. The paradigm is rational, with simplified logical-discursive, linear thinking, with a focus on standard solutions “with the greatest possible degree of automatism”, which corresponds to the classical rationality of “left-brain cognition”, an egocentric and differentiated worldview and formal education. The main drawback of this pedagogical paradigm is the socio-functional approach, and rigid technologization (Khomuttsov, 2006).

However, the installation of the New Age on the formation of the image and style of thinking of people also finds itself in modern educational models. Representatives of "developmental" education oppose the transformation of learning into a process of accumulating knowledge and information, advocate the development of methods and methods for the creative generation of knowledge and skills, pay attention to the development of students' cognitive abilities: thinking, attention, conscious memory, etc. Such qualities of thinking as independence, erudition, realism, self-criticism, consistency, and flexibility should be developed.

It should be noted that not so long ago this installation was of a state nature. Quoting the previous Federal Program for the Development of Education in Russia: “the place of knowledge identified with information, skills, and abilities is occupied by methods of thinking, methods of generating and using knowledge, techniques of understanding and reflection, methods and methods of action” (RF Government, 1980, p. 4).

In recent decades, Russian educational policy, including Dagestan, has been characterized by a pluralism of paradigms and their models. The model of “continuous education” is also popular today, pursuing the goal of turning a person into a subject of cognition throughout life (Pakhomov, 1992). At the same time, the urgent task is to create a modern system of continuous education, training, and retraining of professional personnel, a system of external independent certification of professional qualifications, a system for supporting organizations that provide quality services for continuous professional education, and support for corporate training and retraining programs for professional personnel.

Today, the education system of the Republic of Dagestan includes preschool, general, additional education, orphanages, vocational and higher education of the state and non-state spheres in a total of 2668 organizations covering 625918 pupils, pupils, and students. The state vocational education system of Dagestan compiles an impressive list of more than 55 educational institutions. Of these, there are 16 institutes, academies, and universities and their branches (more than 30%), the rest are lyceums, schools, technical schools, and colleges. The number of institutions of higher professional education located in Dagestan, according to the monitoring of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, together with non-state institutions, is quite impressive, there are 45 of them (17 universities and 28 branches).

The Dagestan structure and functions of education proceed from the urgency of the task of creating a modern system of continuous education, a system of external independent certification of professional qualifications, a system of support for organizations providing quality services of continuous professional education and training and retraining of professional personnel, support for corporate training programs and retraining of professional personnel. These innovations are not always effective, some of them do not improve education.

Poor quality reforms in domestic education are alarming and critically evaluated. Academician Stepin (2011) writes about the clip consciousness that is being formed in people in Russia; therefore, they are easily manipulated. An alternative to it is, in his opinion, systemic thinking, which should be developed by students from school. It is achieved in the process of studying the fundamental sciences – mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, in conjunction with the sciences of the humanities cycle. According to Stepin, “in the course of the education reform in the country, the very foundation that ensures the formation of systemic thinking has been eroded” (Stepin, 2011, p. 103).

According to the methodology adopted in the article and the corresponding hypothesis that it is ethnic, a national culture that appears as the basis for the formation of historically real forms of education, the essence of the philosophy of education is associated with an understanding of the features of socio-philosophical methodology in understanding the role of education in the socio-cultural process. Such is the humanistic function of the philosophy of education. Nowadays, “science and education of a new type are moving into the scientific and educational culture sphere, when every scientist, teacher, and student should be aware of their presence and responsibility in culture” (Blokhovtsova, 2011, p. 6).

The culturological paradigm of education optimally corresponds to these goals in Dagestan. It involves the transition from ideology to culture in pedagogy and education as a method of mastering spiritual values. The integration of education into the culture here means the cultural content of education, the purpose of which is a person of culture. The humanization of education in this paradigm involves the re-creation of the norms and values ​​of national and world culture in order to form a creative self-fulfilling personality. Various models of the culturological model inherit the methods of student-centered education in terms of treating the student as an active subject in a constructive dialogue and cooperation with the teacher in the cultural and educational space for the production of spiritual products. The most important task of the education system at all times was the preparation of a young person for life. The beginning of the new millennium, its first new century, requires a qualitative change in the content of education, which must correspond to the concept of “new humanism”. Note that philosophers and political scientists call the 21st century the century of “neo-humanism”. The orientation of the “new humanism” is not the satisfaction of needs, but the development of human capabilities and abilities. In the middle of the twentieth century, the American psychologist Maslow (2008) built a whole hierarchy, a pyramid of needs, in which ethical and spiritual values ​​led in the perspectives of a modern person. The core of the “new humanism” is humanization, the attitude towards oneself and another not as an object, but as a subject. From the point of view of modern existential philosophy, the attitude to a person as a subject implies the recognition of his rights to uniqueness, activity, inner freedom, and spirituality (Sevruk & Yunina, 2000). The meaning of modern education is radically changing and its humanization. It requires the orientation of education on the human material of the educational process: literature, history, philosophy, on the development of both the humanities and the natural sciences of the world of culture.

Research Methods

The interpretation of education and the development of educational policy in a particular region, depending on its cultural component, is quite effective. Therefore, it is necessary to proceed from methodologically significant statements and justifications about the role of culture in human and social activity. One of the exact formulas of this role is the following statement:

Being an integral characteristic of the generic quality of a person, culture, therefore, has a normative character for him. Then it should act as a criterion for the analysis and evaluation of social processes or as a cultural dimension of human activity. Thus, the new paradigm of education must inevitably be culturally appropriate. This is a logical conclusion in line with the search for strategic guidelines for educational activities (Isakova, 2003, p. 62)

This landmark is the basis for understanding and identifying the features of the Dagestan regional education system.

Findings

In the search for modern optimal educational paradigms in Dagestan, it is important to consider the rational ideas of postmodern pedagogy among the new trends. Although its ideas are skeptical about the role of science, power, and traditions, which are perceived as obstacles to individual freedom, the limitations of its creative thinking. Some postmodernists are in favor of a “society without schools” (I. Illich), others are against the “pedagogy of the oppressed” (P. Freire), which distorts natural language and breaks dialogue based on reciprocity, trust, openness, and the desire for joint learning. Such pedagogy instills communication that suppresses one person by another, “a monologue with its isolation, distrust of a person, full of prescriptions, rigidity, and authoritarianism” (Gusinsky & Turchaninova, 2000, p. 52). At its core, “education provides a person with cultural forms for the realization of his freedom. The personal meaning of education is the awakening of freedom along with the first experiences of the self-discipline of the will. By getting an education, a person not only acquires knowledge but also knows himself, and masters his freedom (Zharov, 2013). Fair criticism of current education by postmodernists for violence by the authorities and society over the individual should not turn into the proposed radical measures to free the school from government control, its transformation into a public institution free from any control.

Conclusion

This paper has clearly shown that a variety of paradigms and models of education is now a responsible task for philosophers of education, theorists of pedagogy, as well as state and republican Dagestan policy. The search for and finding an education system adequate to the objective cultural and national realities is a priority. The preservation of the cultural and religious identity of the Dagestanis and the preservation of Dagestan itself depend on this.

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