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

The article is devoted to the topical issues of value orientation and the formation of identity in Russian education. The norms, implemented in the framework of the educational system reform (in particular, the Federal state educational standards), engender the need in the theoretical understanding and further correcting the educational strategy in this direction. The issues of values and identity, being directly linked to the most general foundations of functioning of any society, are obviously topical, since the positioning of own identity and norms is the basis of the state goal-setting, choice of means and methods of solving any problems which Russia faces. The aim of this article is the correlation of the educational strategy, fixed in the introduced standards, with the deep internal processes of modernity, the totality of which is globalization, and one of its manifestations, post-traditionalism. The posttraditionalism, which is characterized by total reflexivity, «value polytheism» (the expression of M. Weber) and fragmentation of society, creates challenges for any integration projects; and no effective means to overcome them have been developed so anywhere in the world. There are distinguished the main aspects of inefficiency of the Russian educational strategy in the field of value orientation and identity formation. The first is a conflict of identities, both in the community and within the strategy. The lack of a clear justification of the proportion between ethnic and civic, religious and secular, regional and national identities create a situation in which the practitioner does not have a clear answer to the questions: how these identities interact, and which are given priority and in which situations. The reason for this lack of theoretical studying is the second aspect of the problem: the concept of the Russian personis deprived of a clear consistent content due to its isolation from more general philosophical ideological base. Any large-scale projects of identity formation in the past and present (such as the American «melting pot», European multiculturalism, the Chinese «lyanhen»policy, the Soviet project, etc.) were invariably a part of a broad general philosophical system, which formed its objectives, means and results. The concept of the «citizen of Russia» does not have such a basis; therefore, it is deprived of a consensus regarding the internal content and expected results. The conclusion that can be drawn from this analysis is that, in its present form, the education strategy puts the teacherbefore an insurmountable task: to form an identity, which is devoid of a coherent inner content and value orientation in the conditions of absence of the common system of values.