The dependence of the problematics of pedagogy as a science on social and cultural realia of contemporary Russia
T. A. Artashkina
Far Eastern Federal University, building F (26), FEFU campus, 10, Ajax, Russky Island, Vladivostok, Russia
Keywords: pedagogy, crisis of pedagogy, pedagogy as a science, object of pedagogy, subject matter of pedagogy, education, phenomenon of education, concept, differentiation and integration of scientific knowledge, integrative science of education
Abstract
The unity of traditions and renovations is a universal feature of any culture. However, rapid changes in the Russian culture and economy of the early 1990s disrupted communications between the social layers and strata. As a conservative element of education, the system of education ensured communications between various social layers and strata as well as between the existing and the new cultural areas. Dramatic political changes and rapid transition to the market economy had a deteriorating effect upon the system of education and pedagogical sciences. As a result, the traditional organum of pedagogical sciences fell into a state of decay. Without any doubt, the educators were well aware of the crisis in the Russian educational system and pedagogics. Recent years have brought many changes into the theory of pedagogics and experimental pedagogics. However, the problem of defining the subject field of pedagogics as a science has yet to be solved. The article is devoted to the comprehensive analysis of this question. The author adheres to the opinion that finding a solution of this problem is based on two major approaches: either reducing the suggested definitions and explications to the definition of pedagogics or unlimitedly expanding the object and subject of the modern pedagogics. Recent years have also generated a tradition of explicating the meanings of education. However, this approach makes it impossible to reveal the operation of abstraction; instead, the research analysis is aimed at revealing the meaning of the education phenomenon («the meaning of objects»). Based on the logical analysis the author concludes that a concept is a logical status of the notion of education. The logical status of a concept itself carries integrative qualities. Thus, the sciences, traditionally considered as belonging to different fields and areas, have been integrated into an interdisciplinary cluster by the concept of education. Assigning the term pedagogics to this interdisciplinary cluster is not legitimate since this historically developed term fails to cover all subject-object fields of this interdisciplinary cluster. The author considers that the emerging science of education has a far more sophisticated structure than just its disciplinary composition while the object of integrative science of education remains the one: the phenomenon of education. However, the logical status of the concept for education requires additional explication of this object and hence its differentiation and more precise definition while referring to every specific branch of the pedagogical knowledge.
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