Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2014 number 3

The article is devoted to revealing the paradigm structure of modern education in the context of key tasks of formation of the society, functioning on the basis of knowledge. It analyzes the ontological specificities of paradigm situation in education; it introduces the notions of implicit and local paradigms; it describes the structure of implicit paradigm, the content of which is disclosed on the example of research-based education. The difficulties of the analysis of modern education as a social-cultural phenomenon are conditioned by its multiparadigm character and the paradigmatic groups being built in its functioning. The last distinguishes the paradigmatic situation of a sociocultural phenomenon from the natural-science one, the latter having been considered by the paradigmatic analysis due to T.S. Kuhn. The paradigms of doctrinal groups (local paradigms) do not speak about how the reality is organized, but how it should look through the lens of their ideas. Consequently, the concept of educational paradigm requires a philosophical study in view of this distinction. Accounting for the effect of «embedded-ness» of the theory and its carriers, describing the phenomenon, into the phenomenon itself is carried out, for example, within the «performative approach» to the analysis of markets. For the philosophical study of education it is a new problem, which solution will provide an approach to the determination of fundamental structures in its foundation and the paradigmatic organization of the education system as such. The essential foundations of being of a sociocultural phenomenon are expressed in the implicit (strong) paradigm, which is built into the reality, not just thought about. The implicit paradigm is a complex object representing an internal «theory» of functioning of the phenomenon, expressed in the ideal and material forms which constitute the phenomenon and its environment. Its elements are embedded into the physically expressed relationships, institutions, discourses, regulations and similar actually acting objects. The system of its ontological concepts-descriptors (the components of ontological matrix) represents the forms, methods, functions and generalization of the being of the sociocultural phenomenon. For the phenomenon of «education», as the corresponding components of the ontological matrix there act institutionalization and environment, technologism of training practices, the dominant quality of the cognition method, and the educational imperative. The cultural-producing locus of education in the society, functioning on the basis of knowledge, is the research education. It brings up the personality capable of creation of new knowledge, its technologizing and inclusion into socioeconomic relations. Such person is the anthropological-social foundation of a new cultural manufacture. Among the paradigmatic principles of the research education there are the institutional-environmental integration of the socio-cultural environment, which forms the structure of being; the scientific-innovational technologism defining the way of being; the transcendence of scientific cognition characterizing the function of being; the imperative of cognitive freedom constituting the generalization of being.