Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2021 number 3

Introduction. Modern education provides the functioning and reproduction of the system of world division of labor. This fact allows the authors to argue that the problem of inequality in education goes beyond the problems of one state and the society under its control, and therefore an adequate methodological approach is needed to describe and study it. The authors attempt to consider the mechanism of the formation of educational inequality in peripheral societies in which social contradictions are most clearly observed from the perspective of the world-system approach. Methodology and methods of the research. The authors use the theoretical constructions of the world-system approach of I. Wallerstein, S. Amin, F. Cardozo, the ideas of the representatives of the world-system paradigm in comparative education of R.F. Arnove, T. Griffiths, and the concept of a vicious circle of inequality in education by R. Flecha. The authors point to the closeness of ontology, the complementarity of R. Flecha’s ideas and the world-system approach, and propose to synthesize these concepts. On this basis, and also relying on the results of research of a number of theorists of comparative education (M. Carnoy, M. Bray, G. Orfield, Zhao Yong), economists (A. Alesina, E. Spolaore), the authors reconstruct the functioning of R. Flecha’s model of a vicious circle of inequality in education in peripheralized societies from the perspective of the world-system approach. The results of the research. The peripheralization of society presupposes the process of its integration into the world system of division of labor through a narrow specialization of the economy, the formation of export-oriented industries, the destruction of industries and spheres that are not associated with this process, and, as a result, the emergence of surplus labor, economic stratification and marginalization of the population. The costs of the education system as one of the main institutions for the reproduction of the labor force turn out to be excessive and are reduced, the system itself is being reformed. The authors of the paper show that the reform of the education system proceeds in the general direction of integrating society into the world system of the division of labor, when the elite forms priority consumption patterns in a peripheralized society (including patterns of knowledge and education), borrowing they from the countries of the core and the hegemon of the world system. On the one hand, the formation of priority patterns leads to the displacement of their own educational culture, the imitation of the masses of the elite and the uneven spread of the patterns. Since full compliance with the priority patterns is unattainable for the majority of the population, its imitations are spreading. On the other hand, in bureaucratic areas such as education, the introduction and transformation of priority patterns creates a need among the elite to control, rank and reduce those who do not correspond to the idea of «priority». New borrowing and the spread of priority patterns allows the elite to retain the right to symbolic power and perpetuate emerging inequalities. Conclusion. On the basis of the results obtained, the authors propose for discussion questions about the prospects for improving the constructed model and the possibilities of interpreting on its basis the empirical material of the transformation of societies in the post-Soviet space.