Home – Home – Jornals – Professional Education in the Modern World 2020 number 1

Changing the processes of formation of social capital and its human component in conditions when IT and biotechnologies (in their synthesis) are becoming capable of changing not only the biological nature of a person, but also consciousness, qualitatively change the functionality of education. Continuity becomes its defining characteristic. And continuity as a process (from its subjective side, in any case) gets its quality from the permanence of constancy and variability, their “fight”, constantly demanding and generating new qualities of the acting subject. Totally bureaucratized societies (at the extreme - dictatorships), as well as civil neo-liberal state-formal structures (e.g. the family) are no longer able to “regulate” the algorithms of “struggle” of constancy and variability, in which the social capital is individualized and, accordingly, individual human capital is socialized. Individual values and meanings are obviously more dynamic than the traditional social ones, and the motivation and involvement of the individual in their formation depends on the quality of the diverse range of services which the society can provide to the individual, and the individual to the society. Education, acquiring the functionality of a service, is capitalized under new conditions in a different way than it was before. Its necessity as a self-sufficient resource of the individual’s success is “blurred” by the dynamism of social and scientific perversions and the individual, understanding (or not understanding) this, “hurries” to obtain independence (freedom), trying himself in a space which seems more reliable to him, compared to the educational or even family space. This is the space of workplace relations. However, here he faces another problem. His intellectual development (as the ability to solve work issues) appears to be directly determined by the level of professional and very often general culture. And here we again return to the necessity of systematic professional education which provides the real potential of the individual with the need to have a proper symbolic character (a certificate, a diploma, a certificate of advanced training, etc.). The individual’s right for owning symbolic regalia is preceded by a certain process called education. This process is simultaneously fixed as a right and a duty of the individual, and the process of exercising this right and duty forms a kind of “appearance” for the individual’s potential objectification. The implementation of educational services as consumption, the implementation of educational services as distribution, the implementation of educational services as production and even as exchange in the conditions of total commercialization of education have different dynamics. This is a basic ground for the disproportions in meanings (forming in relation to education) for the business market; the system of the educational science itself; the family and civil society; and the individual. While social expenses and massification of education are growing, the marginal return of the educational resource is decreasing. This economic maxim leads to forming a number of such needs (in the individual), which are not realized in a real way, but in a fictitious one, do not reproduce capital and value, but redistribute them. According to the methodology of the reproductive approach, individual human capital can be considered as integration of three components: biological (natural), stationary (permanent), dynamic (adaptive-innovative). The value of the reproduction of the biological component is in the reproduction and optimization of natural abilities as a foundation of lability and success; the meaning of the reproduction of the stationary component (education, professionalism, competence) and, accordingly, reproduction of the dynamic component (adaptability, innovation, ability to compete and competitiveness) is in creating an effective personal eco-system which optimally combine its fictitious and real elements. The place of education in this optimization will be the subject of consideration in this article. The main problems of such consideration become fixed by the following questions: what is fictitious educational capital? how is it formed by the system of modern education? how is it possible to reduce the negative effects of its reproduction? The methodological basis for answering these questions (the author by no means claims to be complete) will be presented by the functional and reproductive approaches which allow us to consider learning as a commodity and education as a specific eco-system for forming and applying the individual’s human potential. The results of the analysis should be considered as the author’s personal position and as an invitation to a discussion.