Педагогика/4.Стратегические направления реформирования системы образования

Крічкер О.Ю.

Академія пожежної безпеки

ім. Героїв Чорнобиля, Україна

Humanitarization of Engineering Education in Higher Educational Establishments

It wasn’t long ago that technical higher education contents was limited to the mastering of general scientific, general technical and special technical knowledge. High school focused mostly on training of technocratic specialists whose task was to decide professionally problems of certain human knowledge aspects.

Today there appears a tendency towards including liberal arts into the educational programs for techies. Liberal arts knowledge plays quite a significate role for an engineer because he/she should understand the results as well as the consequences of the professional activity. Now scientists are searching for the answer to the question: How to humanise technical knowledge and to enhance axiological trend in technical education? Empiric pedagogy tries to arrive at the decision in two ways: by increasing the number of liberal arts or changing the contents and teaching methods of traditional subjects to make them sound generally cultural. Of course, it is unadequate to introduce into the academic plan of a technical higher institution more classes of liberal arts to the derogation of professionally oriented subjects. So we should look for a possibility to combine humanitarian and technical training not, in any case, to limit the classes of the latter because so that studying students won’t only receive knowledge and skills needed in their focused professional field of activity but also mould as personalities.

To our mind, a way-out is a transformation of engineering education into engineering-liberal education by deciding a set of tasks. They are as follows: to train a specialist who would meet the requirements as both a scientist, a tutor and a teacher, to develop professional and personal qualities of a student using a system of lectures, practical and laboratory classes, extracurricular work. What we offer is to help liberal arts instructors who start their work at the engineering faculty by creating at his/her department the conditions under which scientific capacity building is possible.

Engineering education improvement may be achieved by transforming a set of academic disciplines so that they would measure up formulated tasks realised through the changes in the standards of teaching and corresponding tutorials. Of course, there’s no need to repeat general truth that such elements as upbringing and teaching are obligative for education. So to say, the final purpose of engineering education humanitarization is the development of professional and personal qualities, i.e. students should be taught professionalism and their personality should be formed by upbringing.

The cornerstone of education is the principle of democritization and humanization of the teaching process. It is the educational specialist whose task at a class is to create the corresponding atmosphere and he/she is a bearer of cultural and general human values. That is why professional and humanitarian training of a future pedagogue must go hand in hand. The above said means that we need to reconsider the issue in all its new aspects. Firstly, we should cultivate new standards of behaviour which can be achieved on the basis of a new system of excersices on creating situations that require display of behaviour standards, education and good manners.

Upbringing must run through the whole work with the students. In its name the tutorials, delivered partially on the historical method, should refer to famous scientists and personalities who propagated humanism. Their striving for truth, civic duty pursuance, humanity may serve as a pattern to the generation. While acquainting students with the activity of a scientist, a professor should tell about scientist’s vivid aspects of outlook, vision of the world, philosofic credo, motives of scientific activity, methods of getting knowledge.

Knowledge of professional subjects isn’t in itself a guarantee of high consciousness. Outlook and moral orientation of knowledge is needed to combine organically teaching process with development of creative, artistic personality who realizes clearly the role and position in the society.

It is necessary to remember that organizing educational process one should bear in mind the unity of two aspects: objective one - through which moral requirements to a personality by the society are expressed, and subjective - which is expressed in a personal attitude of a man to society. Here instructors’ main task is that objective education should become subjective standard for students. If the accent constantly falls on the logical aspect of teaching, i.e. develops only brains never senses, general knowledge may not reach students and it won’t become their life understanding motive, won’t enter their outlook, this knowledge will be formal. The aim of upbringing lies in formation of students’ moral beliefs. Revealing humanistic essence of education – use of scintific accievements to the benefit of people – not only enreaches the possibilities of general educational disciplines in upbringing students but also increases efficiency of educator’s work in the field of broadening politechnical outlook.

It is obligatory that we should construct teaching and upbringing process so that students could learn moral standards, form moral senses and beliefs during their academic activities. The problem of humanizing young techis must be set up with the teachers of general education subjects because it is at their classes that other special subject studied later are based. So the formost task is to analyze the contents of liberal subjects, make adjustments in accordance to the new educational paradigm, and turn to the personality of students.