EDUCATION or EDUCATION?

Levakova I.V.

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An educated person and a person who has higher education- that's two different concepts In russian language. Why are these concepts not identical? It is not for nothing that the Russian language is called great and powerful; it is capable of conveying not only information, but also shades, irony, allegory and much more. The concept of “educated person” was replaced by the concept of “a person with higher education” or “a person who has a diploma of higher education” most likely in Soviet times. Why? Because having does not mean being. Perhaps this is the result of our education system, which we still consider one of the best in the world.

If our education system was the best in the world, then why did we fare so poorly? We all know very well that money was invested in the military-industrial complex, in the development of science, and in space exploration. Where is the result? The priority in space exploration is ours, but we have neither competitive technologies nor competitive military equipment. The lack of results can hardly be explained by the fact that our scientists are so mediocre that, despite enormous expenses, they were unable to create anything worthwhile.

If our education system was the best in the world, then why have we always had (and still have today) low labor productivity? This can hardly be explained by the fact that we all don’t work enough.

If our education system was the best in the world, then why didn't Soviet students protest against the existing totalitarian regime? Students have always been considered the most progressive part of society. Student unrest stirred Tsarist Russia, happened and are happening in many countries of the world, but in our country, for some reason, students were and are satisfied with everything. This can hardly be explained by the fact that our youth are the most inert and passive part of society.

If our education system was the best in the world, then why was an entire nation defrauded during the “era of perestroika”? Educated people enthusiastically read devastating articles in magazines and shared their impressions of what they saw on TV, and while they were busy discussing what was happening in the country half a century ago, the country disappeared, the “national property” was divided fairly and the period of “shock therapy” began. . Educated people took everything for granted, convinced themselves and each other that “there was no other way,” and began to fit into “market relations,” forgetting about their “best education in the world” and trying to engage in shuttle-cooperative business. This can hardly be explained by the fact that our intelligentsia is incapable of thinking independently and realistically assessing the actions of the authorities.

If our education system was the best in the world, then why don't we know a foreign language? We learn foreign language at school, at college. We have been studying the language for about ten years, but we don’t know how to speak, at best I “read and translate with a dictionary.” We come to another country and observe that poorly educated shop assistants and waiters speak English more or less fluently, but we cannot. This can hardly be explained by the fact that we are the most incapable of languages.

The list of questions can be continued endlessly. Of course, the shortcomings of our life cannot be explained solely by the defects of the education system, but I would like the concept of “a person with a higher education” to disappear and the concept of an “educated person” to remain.

The preamble of the Law of the Russian Federation “On Education” states that “Education in this Law is understood as a purposeful process of education and training in the interests of an individual, society, and state, accompanied by a statement of the achievement by a citizen (student) of educational levels (educational qualifications) established by the state.” Education is not only the acquisition of “knowledge, abilities and skills”, but also upbringing, and upbringing has priority.

Perhaps those questions that remained unanswered arose due to the fact that education within the framework of our educational system has set and is setting as its goal the education not of a free-thinking person, but of a puppet person. Such a puppet is incapable of thinking independently, therefore, incapable of creativity, protest, she lives according to stereotypes imposed by someone. Stereotypes can be different. You can work in order to build a bright communist society, or you can work in order to earn money and consume, consume, consume... In the end, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that an educated person determines his life priorities himself, but for a person with a higher education they are imposed from above and he meekly accepts them as an axiom. So is it worth saying that existing system education is one of the best in the world?

There are two very similar concepts - education and education. What is the specificity of their understanding?

What is the specificity of understanding education?

Concept education most often corresponds to the body of knowledge acquired by a person. The larger their volume, the higher the level of education. What is also important is the variety and quality of knowledge, and also, which is very important, the skills associated with its application.

Another important aspect is the demand for the knowledge a person receives. It is highly desirable that their development would have significance from the point of view of practical applicability. But even if a person masters knowledge for himself, nevertheless, as a rule, he can directly or indirectly apply a significant amount of it in practice.

Education can be obtained by a person:

1. through visiting specialized institutions - schools, secondary vocational institutions, universities;
2. through training in online courses (both recorded and via webinars);
3. through self-study - from books, the same online sources;
4. in the order of individual communications with carriers of knowledge and skills - mentors, trainers, consultants.

Education in specialized institutions, as a rule, requires confirmation of acquired knowledge, and in some cases, the ability to apply it, in exams and through other formats for testing student competencies.

Self-education, in turn, can be accompanied by testing the student using methods that he develops himself. In some cases, he may seek assistance from a specialized institution - for example, in order to pass a test to obtain a certificate of knowledge assessment, which does not require the person to participate in training at this institution.

Education is a process. It can have any duration and content - this is determined by the person himself.

What is the specificity of understanding education?

Under education refers to the fact that a person has a significant amount of knowledge, as well as skills that allow him to apply this knowledge in practice. Education is the concrete result of a person receiving education. Even if in some cases it is very modest, it is sufficiently tangible and allows the knowledge holder to subsequently successfully increase its volume.

In modern society, a number of sufficiency criteria have been adopted this result- that is, an acceptable level of education of a person. In Russia, this means that a citizen has at least a secondary education - or at least 9 grades. This will allow a person, for example, to continue studying at a lyceum, and upon graduation, at a university.

Education is the most important social attribute of a citizen of almost any developed country. Its presence predetermines a person’s career prospects and becomes a resource for him to acquire higher social status.

There is a widespread point of view that in modern society, education of an informal nature is no less in demand - acquired not at school or university, but in the course of a person’s acquisition of everyday experience, in the process of communicating with other people. However, this method of obtaining education has a drawback - it is characterized by narrowness. A person, acquiring knowledge and skills informally, can apply them only in those relationships in which they were actually acquired - but in practice, he will not always participate in such communications. A person may have difficulty communicating in other areas.

In turn, education achieved within the framework of systemic education - at school and at university, allows a citizen to feel more or less confident in different relationships. Of course, provided that learning programs will be compiled with high quality.

Comparison

The main difference between education and sophistication is that the first term denotes the process of acquiring knowledge and skills by a person, and the second - a certain amount of them that has formed, a tangible result of learning, on the basis of which knowledge and skills can subsequently be increased. The quality of a person’s education is how fundamental his education will be.

Having determined what the difference is between education and sophistication, we will reflect the conclusions in the table.

When it comes to education, it is definitely necessary to clarify what exactly we mean by this very, very broad concept. Education is often confused with being educated, but these are, as they say in one well-known city, “two big differences.”

It’s not for nothing that we cited Einstein’s quote as an example. After all, in modern world education is a very abstract concept that rather implies educational establishments than real knowledge. For some, these are years spent, if not wasted, then most often without much benefit. This is outdated knowledge obtained from outdated books, incorrect answers received to illiterate questions from unqualified teaching staff. On the other hand, education is the best, brightest and most effective years of life, spent not in vain, but for the benefit of oneself and others

What is the difference

Perhaps the whole difference is in how a person perceives an educational opportunity and how he deals with it, even if it does not live up to his hopes. Some of us, disillusioned with the modern educational system, give up and stop striving for academic heights. Others, on the contrary, delve into the depths of self-knowledge and try to educate themselves - with the help of the huge amount of information that has become publicly available with the spread of the Internet.

But education is a completely different concept. Education implies erudition, encyclopedic knowledge, a certain level of knowledge and skills. And, despite the close connection, a priori, empirics show that education and education may not be related to each other (although ideally they should complement each other).

So which is ultimately more important of these two concepts for modern man? Let's try to understand this difficult issue. Education is undoubtedly an important criterion for both professional growth and social status. Of course, the world knew exceptions to this rule, but they usually confirmed this rule.

The academic minimum has always been closely and inextricably linked to one’s position in society. In fact, practical knowledge and education are sometimes more important. History knows many cases when a person with education, in fact, did not have this very education. And vice versa: a person without scientific degrees with high level education, he was well versed in this or that subject, and was at his best.

Process and result

There is also a version among teachers that education is a process, and education is the result. The version, of course, has a right to exist, but it is difficult to agree with it one hundred percent. After all, if education is a process, why is it perceived by many as a result? “Get an education”, “I got an education”, “I now have an education” - phrases familiar to everyone that make one doubt this option interpretation of the concept. And, on the contrary, education is rather not a result, but a state in which a person finds himself. Instead of “I have become educated,” we say “I have become educated,” “I am educated,” perceiving education as a new, improved state of the human “I,” his consciousness and the totality of thoughts.

That is why, despite all the differences and interpretations, one must strive for education, not forgetting about education. Perfect option– this is the case when one is adjacent to the other and complements it. However, knowing that the ideal cannot be achieved in life, I would like to advise future bright minds only one thing: do not chase degrees without having real practical knowledge. It’s better to be considered an educated ignoramus than an amateur with a doctorate.

To knowledge about the world, values, experience accumulated by previous generations.

Education, like science, can be considered in tex aspects:

• it's holistic knowledge system a person about the world, supported by relevant skills in various fields of activity;
• it's purposeful education personality, the formation of certain knowledge and skills;
• it's a system social institutions, providing pre-vocational and vocational training.

Purpose Education is the introduction of a person to the beliefs, ideals and values ​​of the dominant part of society.

Functions education are as follows:

• upbringing;
• socialization;
• training of qualified specialists;
• joining modern technologies and other cultural products.

Education criteria

Education- this is the result.

Educated person- a person who has mastered a certain amount of systematized knowledge and, in addition, is accustomed to thinking logically, highlighting causes and consequences.

The main criterion of education- systematic knowledge and systematic thinking, manifested in the fact that a person is able to independently restore the missing links in the knowledge system using logical reasoning.

Depending on the amount of knowledge gained and achieved level of independent thinking There are primary, secondary and higher education. By nature and direction Education is divided into general, vocational and polytechnic.

General education gives knowledge of the fundamentals of sciences about nature, society, man, forms a dialectical-materialistic worldview, develops cognitive abilities. General education provides an understanding of the basic patterns of development in the world around us, the educational and work skills necessary for every person, and a variety of practical skills.

Polytechnic education introduces the basic principles modern production, develops skills in handling the simplest tools that are used in everyday life.

The role of education in human life

Through education, transmission occurs from one generation to another.

On the one hand, education is influenced by the economic and political spheres public life, as well as the sociocultural environment - national, regional, religious traditions (therefore, models and forms of education differ significantly from each other: we can talk about Russian, American, French education systems).

On the other hand, education is a relatively independent subsystem social life, which can influence all spheres of society. Thus, the modernization of education in the country allows us to further improve the quality labor resources and therefore contribute to economic development. Civic education promotes democratization political sphere society, legal - strengthening the legal culture. In general, quality education forms a harmonious personality both in general cultural terms and in professional terms.

Education has great importance not only for society, but also for the individual. In modern society, education is the main “social elevator” that allows a talented person to rise from the very bottom of social life and achieve high social status.

Education system

Education is one of the most important spheres of social life, the functioning of which determines the intellectual, cultural, and moral state. The end result comes down to the education of the individual, i.e. its new quality, expressed in the totality of acquired knowledge, skills and abilities.

Education retains its potential as a determining factor in the socio-economic development of Russia.

Education system includes:

• preschool educational institutions;
• educational institutions;
• educational institutions of higher vocational education(higher education institution);
• secondary educational institutions special education(secondary specialized educational institution);
• non-state educational institutions;
• additional education.

Educational institutions are a massive and extensive system. Their network influences the socio-economic situation both in the country and in the regions. Educational institutions impart knowledge, moral principles and customs of society.

The most important social institution in the education system is a school.

Challenges facing education management:

• low wage teachers;
• insufficient material and technical support for educational institutions;
• shortage of personnel;
• inadequate professional level education;
• insufficient level of general culture.

Education structure

Education, like any social subsystem, has its own structure. Thus, in the structure of education we can distinguish educational institutions(schools, colleges, universities), social groups (teachers, students, pupils), educational process (the process of transferring and assimilating knowledge, abilities, skills, values).

The table shows the structure of education using an example Russian Federation. Basics general education in the Russian Federation until the age of 15 is compulsory.

In addition to preschool, general and vocational education, the following are sometimes distinguished:

• additional education that runs parallel to the main one - clubs, sections, Sunday schools, courses;
• self-education — independent work to acquire knowledge about the world, experience, and cultural values. Self-education is a free, active path of cultural self-improvement, allowing you to achieve the best success in educational activities.

By forms of education When structuring, full-time, correspondence, external, individual plan, and distance forms are distinguished.

Selected information is transmitted to students using certain teaching aids, sources of information (the teacher’s word, tutorial, visual and technical aids).

Basic principles of content formation school education:

• Humanity, ensuring the priority of universal human values ​​and human health, free development;
• Scientificity, manifested in the correspondence of the knowledge offered for study at school to the latest achievements of scientific, social and cultural progress;
• Subsequence, which consists in planning content that develops according to uplink, where each new knowledge is based on the previous one and follows from it;
• Historicism, meaning the reproduction in school history courses of the development of a particular branch of science, human practice, coverage of the activities of outstanding scientists in connection with the problems being studied;
• Systematicity, which involves the consideration of the knowledge being studied and the skills being formed in the system, the construction of all training courses and all content schooling as systems included in each other and in common system human culture;
• Connection with life as a way to test the validity of the knowledge being studied and the skills being developed and as a universal means of reinforcing school education with real practice;
• Age appropriate and the level of preparedness of schoolchildren who are offered to master this or that system of knowledge and skills;
• Availability, determined by the structure curricula and programs, way of presentation scientific knowledge in educational books, as well as the order of introduction and the optimal number of subjects studied scientific concepts and terms.

Two subsystems of education: training and education

Thus, the concepts of “training” and “education” are the most important pedagogical categories, which make it possible to distinguish interconnected, but not reducible to each other, subsystems of education as a purposeful, organized process of human socialization.

Moreover, we are talking about the understanding of the term “education” in in the narrow pedagogical sense of the word, as a subsystem of education, which is on the same level with training, at the same level, and not “under it” or “above it,” which can be schematically expressed as follows (Fig. 1).

Rice. 1. Two subsystems of education

This distinction in the education system has already been highlighted Plato, who in the dialogue “The Sophist” called for distinguishing “from the art of teaching the art of educating,” and in “The Laws” he argued that “we recognize proper education as the most important thing in teaching.” Moreover, by education he understood the formation in a person of a positive attitude towards what he is taught, introducing him not only to knowledge, but also to methods of activity.

Since then, attempts have been made many times to define training and education and to separate these processes. In recent decades, very promising approaches to solving this problem have been proposed in domestic pedagogical science, primarily by researchers such as AND I. Lerner, V.V. Kraevsky, B.M. Bim-Bad and etc.

Moreover, their concepts were not mutually exclusive, but complemented each other and, from the point of view of their main content, boiled down to the following:

• training and education are subsystems of the unified educational process;
• training and education are aspects of a purposefully organized process of human socialization;
• the difference between teaching and upbringing is that the first is primarily addressed to the intellectual side of a person, and upbringing is addressed to his emotional-practical, value-based side;
• training and education are not only interconnected processes, but also mutually supporting and complementary.

As noted Hegel, You cannot teach carpentry and not teach carpentry, just as you cannot teach philosophy and not teach philosophizing.

From this follows the general conclusion that education will be educational only when, along with educational goals, educational goals are also set and implemented. But still, in this two-pronged process there is a main link, and this is precisely training, which provides knowledge as the most solid basis of education.

By expression K.D. Ushinsky, education is a construction process in which a building is erected, and knowledge is its foundation. This building has many floors: skills, abilities, abilities of students, but their strength depends primarily on the quality of the foundation laid in the form of knowledge.

The unity of training and education is determined by nature itself pedagogical process, which includes targeted training and education as subsystems of education.

One of the most daring, interesting and noteworthy books on economic policy was published in 2003, and its author is not an economist. Alison Woolf is a professor and teaches education at the University of London. Few academics of his caliber would dare to write a book questioning the very myth that perhaps most haunts politicians: the myth that a society's level of education is the key to its economic prosperity.

However, it was this sacred cow that was encroached upon by the author of the book “” (Alison Wolf.). The book focuses on the situation in Great Britain, where Prime Minister Tony Blair outlined three priority areas for his government: “education, education, education.” However, the author’s arguments and conclusions are extremely significant and relevant not only for this country.

If we talk about specific people, then, as the facts discussed in the book show, education - i.e. “the right qualification in the right field from the right institution” certainly matters (unsurprisingly). Moreover, nowadays education means much more than ever. Those who do not complete their schooling or secondary education are likely (and increasingly likely) to earn little. People without a college degree, and in some cases without a diploma from a good university, increasingly face the same bitter fate. In other words, being educated is very beneficial for a particular person. However, it is necessary to answer another question, which is especially relevant for countries where the education system (including higher education) is financed by the state: what is the benefit of education for the state as a whole?

As the book argues, this benefit is much smaller than one might think. In particular, increasing the level of education does not necessarily contribute to economic growth, as most politicians (and economists) wrongly believe.

There can hardly be any doubt about the need for primary and secondary education. Life in modern society requires high literacy and basic mathematical knowledge. Those who leave primary or secondary school without receiving such knowledge become a burden to society and others. And, most importantly, modern society needs excellent universities that would produce a sufficient, but not too large number of specialists capable of conducting research and working in their specialty as doctors, engineers and scientists. More broadly, education contributes (or can contribute) to the acquisition of qualifications and skills that increase productivity. It can be assumed that when labor productivity in a society increases, then the society itself becomes more productive.

What is the problem then? If all of the above is true, then why shouldn’t society benefit economically from increasing levels of education? However, there is one important “but”: education is a relative thing; education in itself cannot guarantee a high salary; The point is to be more educated than others. Getting an education is, in a sense, a race: if everyone runs faster, that may be good in itself, but that doesn't mean that large quantity a person will be able to break through to the top, where the top 10% live. Thus, a significant portion of extra effort may be wasted. And we should remember this when assessing the benefits that society can receive by increasing the cost of education.

Woolf's book is remarkable because it draws the reader's attention not only to this obvious, albeit important, fact, but also to the dangers associated with the current obsession with education and economic growth. One of these dangers is that if education is pursued carelessly, the link between education and economic growth may be weakened. Another is that excessive preoccupation with economic growth narrows and distorts society's idea of ​​what education actually is.

In Britain, as in many other countries, the emphasis on economics has resulted in an obsession with numbers: the government wants more people to go to university and is pursuing financial policy accordingly. And it seems that quantitative growth has led to a deterioration in the quality of university education. This is one of the losses. In addition, attracting a mass of teachers to high school has a bad effect on high school, where the best teachers are starting to leave. But perhaps the worst thing is that leading universities are beginning to feel a lack of resources. As a result, they can no longer produce as well as they once did the brightest students destined for leading roles at the forefront of science and technology.

Why is there an outflow of resources from elite universities? This may seem unlikely, especially if the government is convinced that education is the key to economic growth. However, experience shows the opposite. The more effort is spent on attracting students to universities, the greater the lack of funds in the educational system as a whole, because the state needs funds to carry out its educational policy. Moreover, when a government decides to make access to higher education easier—usually at taxpayer expense—it becomes difficult to political level give preference to leading universities. After all, this way the whole idea can lose its egalitarian pathos. Thus, best universities find themselves in a cramped position, and one of the main links between education and economic growth is under attack.

So, the position “education, education, education” leaves much to be desired. But in any case, the author of the book insists, education is more than economics. Consequences of pushing through large quantity people going to university will be disappointed not only in economic terms. Because this process is driven by a pernicious preoccupation with economic growth, it will affect other aspects of society that are not thought to be conducive to growth. “Our recent ancestors,” the author concludes, “who lived much poorer than us, set other goals for education: cultural, moral and intellectual. By neglecting these tasks, we impoverish ourselves.”