Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2018 number 1

The semiotics of education (edusemiotics) is a relatively new branch of the philosophy of education, which, in the opinion of the author, has the potential for rethinking and resolving the contradictions that have accumulated in the system of modern Russian education. The source of controversy is seen by the author in the wrong choice of the conceptual metaphor of education that the creators of modern educational policy and reforms put in the basis of designing the desired results of transformations, namely the industrial root-metaphor that views the education system from the standpoint of economics centered logic. The results of analysis of sociological research in the sphere of education and the content analysis of the educational discourse used for metaphorical modeling confirm the primacy of this metaphor over others. The linguistic markers of this metaphor are the following: educational service, the consumer of educational services, the effectiveness of the educational process, the optimization of the educational process, knowledge as a commodity, etc. A similar metaphor prevails in the United States. The consequences of this metaphor, which forms the consciousness of citizens, is the passive role of students, the devaluation of the teacher's work, inadequate criteria for assessing the quality of education. An alternative metaphor is the metaphor of «participation» or «practice» that compares education with travel, farming or construction, implying the joint creative activity of students and teachers, the active role of the former and the high status of the latter. Unfortunately, in the domestic educational discourse this metaphor is used only by a part of the professional community, and nor by regulators or all other citizens. The author believes that edusemiotics has the potential to draw public attention to the importance of the root-metaphor of education declared at the state level, since it is this branch of the philosophy of education that studies the process of semiosis and the relationship between the meanings that the conceptual metaphor of education operates.