Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2016 number 4

Form is one of the key concepts in modern educational theory and practice. The results and effects of educational systems mainly depend on how a specific field of knowledge, the educational process and its components are shaped. Today it is inappropriate to question the primacy of form or contents as form is substantial and contents are modeled. These categories have an immediate correlation. The article is devoted to the concrete definition of one of the central didactics concepts, the definition of «form». The paper includes a historical reconstruction of this concept and its hermeneutic analysis. Three notions of form differentiation are provided: an object’s structural organization, a situational structural organization, and a subject's structure. The fact that for modern didactics the form is not a means of «packaging» the knowledge and not a means of its transmission, but rather an activity management structure is presented. The grounds are presented for claiming that education set up in a reproductive form is certainly decelerating compared to education set up in a productive form, which has a chance to become leading. Didactics can be viewed as a narrow applied discipline based on logical and psychological models, building up schemes of an optimal cognitive process and mastering new knowledge. This setting can be clearly traced in classical researches implying the pupil’s passive role of the object of education (it was accurately formulated by I. Y. Lerner), and in the works created in the framework of functional approach, in which the pupil is meant to be the subject (with the understanding of subjectivity reduced to logical or psychological notions). Another setting can be considered: viewing education as a philosophical practice with expanding the subjectivity problem, as a problem of involving the person into cultural practices and forms of activity, his/her self-determination and self-actualization as a socio-cultural subject able to set his/her own, not motivated by school objectives. This concept that has been developing in the classical European rationalism tradition is rather abstract as a philosophical concept. This is why the way to constructing the real educational theory calls both for addressing the philosophical category system, especially for understanding the subject and the form structuring and compiling the subject, as well as for those educational practices, in which this wide frame of concept is contained.