Философия/2. Социальная философия

TRANSITIVITY OF EDUCATION AS A DEVELOPMENT MECHANISM OF ESSENTIAL HUMAN FORCES

DSc Ivankina L.I.

National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University, Russia

An educational process is transitive according to its nature and predestination. The initial basis position of the transitive nature of education is the idea of the human substance as the opportunity of its actual realization, as an open opportunity. Transitive potentiality is an essential quality, characterizing education as a continual change by means of mastering knowledge and skills of a person’s inner social-cognitive and individual-personal status. The multi-level system of person’s ontological characteristics can be presented as the following triad: objective reality (as a source of potencies) – energy (as a power, realizing potencies) – realization (as potency actualization). It is the point of transitive processes intersection of inner self-development and outer self-determination, where real living Space and Time, demonstration of a culture being general way, its development arise. Organic link between the inner and the outer, their mutual transition ensure substantial validity of interpersonal development process and social-historic process on the whole. The aggregate of person’s demonstrations, which presents what a person actually is – inner and outer, conscious and unconscious, body and psychic ones, and others – contains a person’s functional integrity, appearing in an integrating function, which connects peculiarities of environment with individual-personal properties in space-time and information-energy coordinates, forming corresponding structures. Owing to this, a person is an unfinished, forming being substance, creating and showing his worth, appropriating and self-studying.

The suggested model of transitive potentiality of education includes three basic components: a person’s living power, his living world (everyday life, or life practices) and choice necessity as the immanent condition of development. Determinative features of this model are potentiality, integrity and transitivity.

The “supreme reality” of a person’s living world is everyday life practices, in which a person self-realizes as specification and potentiality embodied by him in real life, appearing to be his continuation and organic part. Everything specific-existing appears out of potentiality being as the inseparable unity of distinctness and uncertainty dynamism (S.L. Frank, 1915), including initial freedom. On one hand, everyday world reality adds up to the experience world of an acting subject, the world of common sense, ordinary ideas, routine-like activity, accomplishing in common and usual life situations; on the other hand, it plays the role of challenges for a person, who faces new tasks, never experienced before. The multitude of survival problems and turns of mind changes appear as the result of combinations, harmonies and dissonances among parts and layers of informational being, and in the world of changing senses a person finds himself in the situation of permanent choosing. Due to a person’s spiritual-sensible ability to get the character of eidos embodiment (the ideal), realization becomes creative (in Greece terminology – creation) revelation of human potencies, personal regulation of energy realization. The existence of culture, a way of thinking, language turns to be possible through “the narrow gates” of individual realization.

The combination of contradictory tendencies, concerning, on one hand, the necessity to stabilize, fix and transfer the generations’ experience, on the other hand, the opportunities for person’s changes, and through him, the society changes on the whole, laid potential source for current and future changes in education. Difference in potentials between person’s inner motives and outer living standards by means of abilities development disproportion provides a person with an opportunity of innovative activity. Due to knowledge mastering, skills development, training and improvement a person gets a potential, which produces activity, energy, channeled off for creating the new. Real education efficiency was referred by М. Heidegger (1936) to the fact, that it transfers a person from the ordinary space of available subjects to an absolutely another space, where the world gets clarified, and the existing in general comes into the non-concealment of its being. It is development potentiality, oriented on the comprehension of the world through the individual self-comprehension, which is the main feature of education.

Individual educational practice is a process of social-culture fluctuations, permanent search of being variants in everyday practice, which enables to react vividly to outer surrounding development and change. A self-studying person, finds himself in constant transfer movement from one condition to another one, which have no clear frontier between (“I understand - I don’t understand”, “I know – I don’t know”, “I can – I cannot”, etc.), and one includes another, which provides the fixation of civilization searches in cultural component of everyday practice. The metaphor of “butterfly” fixing transformations from one level to another and arising new opportunities might represent the transitive potentiality of education. An individual first absorbs knowledge (“caterpillar”), then comprehends and finds opportunities to put it into practice (“chrysalis”), and within this process a new personal structure (“butterfly”) comes to existence. From the position of synergetic approach this process can be understood the following way: a system, on exceeding the bounds of its phase space, “compacts” its integrity and comes to a standstill waiting for a new choice, mobilizing its potentiality and “calling to work” deep-laid factors unfamiliar for ratio and not laying in the present time. The occurred bifurcation means the existence of a new reality. It can be claimed, that education is the example of such an exponentiation turn, when there is an outcome to new opportunities, person’s resources, presenting in him, but not really revealed. On this basis we can come to the conclusion that education, determining the change of the original symmetry, is a bifurcation factor, putting a person’s author poetic system in condition of choosing his own decisions and actions, when not only the exhaust of traditional development resource (structural unfit of system to newly opening resourceuralunitiestialitying ner ner and outer ly opening resource), but also the transitivity of a newly formed quality to other system features turns to be the reason for balance cessation.

An author poetic system possessing its own behavior changes by means of natural drift. By “drift” we mean permanent synthesis of one’s own actions, happening under the influence of surrounding fluctuations. A system is characterized by the variety of its own behavior, it provides the world of outer disturbances with its own meanings, making it its own world by bringing sense, novelty, unpredictability to it. Vertical transfer from one system level to another one is a leap-like in the form of structural transfer (also including the one of a logic barrier) and is an object-forming (dividing) factor. Order appears as a developing process: forming (being as incompleteness), but not become (being as permanency). Subject engagement in various connections forms the communicative space of interactions, which are the space of set senses. Operating them, a person producers new senses; owing to that education is dispersibly built in the system of civilization order parameters, being the distillation of social changes, when a new structure arises through education in society and it transfers itself to a higher (with relation to structure complication) condition, accomplishing synergetic effect of the new level order appearing. A person’s free combining senses of the past, the present and the future realizes the civilization code of being, appearing as the means of continual development and growth.

By means of education the structure is not only fixed in a person, but also transforms through the development and change of a person himself. Getting involved into the system change process, education effects on life prolongation of complicated structure and plays the role of an attractor of social systems evolution, fixing information valuable for self-developing systems, that makes it an informational structure-code, which is a functional sub-system of other systems and accumulates all other intentions of human activity, penetrating into all spheres of social life and providing the continuity of social communities and individuals reproduction, although the reproduction process itself can undergo essential transformations.

Mutual determination of the inner and the outer leads to F. Varel’s (1965) conception of inactivated (situational) comprehension, according to which the world surrounding a person and the things he does in order to present himself in this world are undivided: the global is both the reason and the result of local actions at the same time. The given position is the basis to the statement, that education is a scholastic system by its nature. U. Ross Ashby in his book “Introduction into cybernetics” (1956) specificated the fact, that a system can not produce anything new, unless it includes a certain source of a chance. In the context of a scholastic system the nature of education is defined as civilization-cultural, as both development and reproduction, and here lays its fundamental difference from science and technology, which are first and foremore innovation-oriented. Another system development approach cannot be applied to education, as well as education cannot be called a print of society, since it is not its copy.

The whole can only be considered historically specified, i.e. as a unity happening within itself and keeping itself. To our mind, this condition is fulfilled, when education is considered a self-organization product, i.e. “from within”, in formation. Scholastic culture genesis model gives foundation to the fact, that the level of society freedom already accomplished the adaptation function and possessing a number of standards is firstly filled by occasional actions. In the course of time these actions freeze in self-organization processes and turn to standard structures, forming an inner-cultural sample, imposing an individual the must-schemes. P. Sorokin (1924) paid attention to the fact that representatives of a culture tend to exhaust powers set in it and bring them to the push, when they have to refer to other principles and move towards another culture type. Non-equilibrium happens to be the foundation of order formation. In order to maintain its integrity, a system should regularly overcome the tendency for scholastic decay, and therefore exist in an oscillatory mode, which enables to slow down processes and set a general development tempo inside a complicated structure. Development dynamics deals with regular interchange of speed-up and slow-down processes modes, modes of structuralizing and eliminating differences, partial structures decay with regular displacement of influence focus from the center to the periphery and backwards.

A person as an author poetic system is capable of doing an appropriate activity and making choice by means of self-correcting opportunities. The diverging processes deal with constant development widening, deepening and functioning, creative opportunities; meeting processes are otherwise related to the consequence of events, their predictability. For a definite person, living in a limited space-time interval, divergence is real and serves for a potential source of disorder (novelty), preferences and choice opportunity, while educational institute is a subject, providing its differentiation by fulfilling the task of controlling order in chaos. The choice process determines formal similarity and repeatability of structure, shapes, technologies, and processes in the world education practice. Being inseparately connected with dynamics of social-economic, political, social-cultural and other changes in society, education possesses relative steadiness and stability even in most crisis moments of social development. This provides discontinuity of social communities and individuals reproduction, although the reproduction process itself undergoes transformations.

The structuralizing process in education presents a spontaneous generation of an ordered consequence, the hierarchy of dynamic structures – energy-forms. Synergetic character of this phase (this level) as misbalancing, exceeding usual modes and stereotypes of existence, actualizes the education as bifurcation ability to the potential. Their difference from usual stable, static structures is that they are not conditions, but modes, and thus are not realized separately, apart from the process. It is important, that the acception of increasing quantity of free energy not only increases its quantity, but also leads to the growth of energy density in a system. Such processes attracted attention of many investigators, in particular G. Deleuze (1986), who marked the main parameters of energy anthropologic model, where a person is presented as a dynamic form, caused by the combination of various inner and outer component powers.

System condition, achieved set balance, is not stable, it is extremely unsteady, and is characterized as self-organized criticality condition. Understanding “self-organized criticality” is important in the context of transitive potentiality of education, since its increase is directly connected with the person’s education level. It is not by chance, that education caused fear for centuries, and knowledge itself used to be sacral, available for the selected only.

Outer changes are synergetic non-equilibrium for education, when a system meets their challenge it comes to a higher and more perfect condition from the point of structure complication; synergetic effect of order appearance is observed. In relation to this, the processes occurring in modern education cannot be assessed as negative. The ambivalent role of alien fluctuations in the fate of any social system, which can be applied to the educational system as well, was grounded by А. J. Toynbee (1935), who noted that, on one hand, a roaming element placed in an alien social body starts producing chaos, on the other hand, such a situation contains powerful constructive intention, since recombination of the changed elements tends to “create a new integrity, but not a simple mechanical combination, as culture tends to become self-structuralized” [1. P.581]. In the given context education appears as a resort source of social life support.

The determinate chaos model includes a steady structural order on macro-level with “uncoordinated” chaos on the micro-level forming it. The prototype of the given micro-organization law are archetypical symbols of “maze” and “world axis”, or “world tree”, where the transmission to a higher level of organization (order) concerns the transmission to a new quality system (evolutional) level. In relation to this, an education cycle should include not only a production-accumulation process (metaphor “feeding”), but also innovation as increasing mobility (metaphor “maze”), enabling to consider education as not a peculiar museum, where every bit of information is kept, but as a processes constantly destroying and generating a new structure and information.

Including knowledge into a development process and using it in a subject activity area have determined the accelerating renovation and the moving forces and trends of social links, their transformation, increasing civilization identity (similarity in behavior, outlook, values etc.). That became obvious at the age of modern information-communicative technologies. An academic activity instituted in a conventional model has got the status of civilization structure, reproducing senses of human existence, securing for itself the priority right for knowledge reproduction, accumulation and widening. Such a wide context including education in the ways of human existence creates the variety of usage functions of the given type of activity and a social institute on the whole (socializing, cognitive, professional, psychological, economical, ideological functions, the function of social mobility, social control and others). Transitive potentiality of education might be symbolizes and most fully reflected by a well-known world culture image of world tree life, developing and comprehending being sense, embodying the main binary semantic oppositions, which formed a hierarchy in the united system of the world order horizontal-vertical connections. In educational practices specific human energy configurations, serving for rise stages towards a meta-empiric practice target – the supreme spiritual condition, achieve soundness and steadiness, when combination, energies cohesion of different human being organization levels realize within them. On the whole, the creation and self-creation process of a person’s substance is a transitive factor and the world of education; as it was suggested by М. Scheler (1926), it is a universe focused on one person.

In the informational society education being the intention of civilization development is the reaction to transmission imperative of anthropogenic world system into the universality of a person’s inner world. This gives occasion to claim, that the true mankind history formation singled out by К. Jaspers (1949) is immanently bound up with education. While investigating the mechanism of social changes, J. Habermas (1976) singled out its main element – interaction, which has secured itself and formed an ideology. Such a problem is currently the one of understanding the place and role of education in the fate of modern mankind. The formed misbalance in comprehending education nature and the reduction of education to only a technologic process and a way to meet consumer’s demand in a specialty in the context of today’s civilization discourse is inadmissible and requires the restitution of its initial denominative power, noticed by Plato (360 B.C.) in parable about cave – to develop a person as integrity.

Literature:

1. Toynbee А. J. A Study of history. – Moskow: Progress, 1991.