Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2017 number 4

Russia's current educational policy takes into account the world trends in the development of the education sector and reflects the complex process of seeking and formulating national interests in the field of education, which should become the basic priorities for the education system in general and higher education in particular. The vector of educational policy becomes especially important in the period of the crisis structural transformations of society, as it determines its further development. Despite the fact that over the past decades the state has been carrying out an intensive series of reforms in the sphere of science and education aimed at training practical practitioners who are ready to carry out their activities in the conditions of the emerging knowledge society, nevertheless, the transition of the Russian society to a qualitatively new level of development occurs. The purpose of the work is to identify the reasons for this discrepancy. To solve the problem, it is proposed to turn to the historical and philosophical analysis of the domestic educational policy, since the social and economic crisis that occurred in Russia in the 1990s, is not the first, significantly inhibited the positive processes in the development of science and education. So, no less serious impact on the development of all social institutions of our society was a systemic crisis that occurred in the Russian society at the beginning of the 20th century, which showed that the domestic system of higher education, which was formed in the XIX century in accordance with the European university tradition, did not satisfy the demands placed on the part of the developing socialist society. The paper considers the basic principles of the organization of the system of national education, which were laid in conditions of overcoming the crisis of the beginning of the 20th century and remained virtually unchanged for many decades; the strengths and weaknesses of the educational policy are outlined; an analogy is made with the systemic crisis that occurred in Russia at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The brief historical and philosophical analysis of the changes in the Russian educational policy in the context of crisis situations, conducted in this paper, clearly demonstrated that at critical moments the rigid regulation of the activities of higher education institutions on the part of the state is increasing; at the same time, the educational institutions of the «narrow» practice-oriented specialization come to the forefront, while the classical university education, which is directed not at training a specialist but as bringing up a citizen, a «cultural personality» at the expense of familiarizing the student with various fields of modern knowledge, loses their positions. Ultimately, this fact can lead to a radical transformation of the national mentality, as well as a break with the spiritual and moral traditions of the national culture.