Trends of the West «Enlightenment Philosophy of Education» in the Context of Contemporary Social Development

Abstract

The article is devoted to fundamental problems and value strategies of education. It is shown, that motion from general to concrete, when a social context is constantly engaged in the process of cognition, enables adequately, basing on system approach, to define leading logic of development of education and upbringing. The shift in the Western social philosophy of education in the direction of personal responsibility and initiative inevitably transforms the social problems into enlightenment ones. A person declared guilty of his or her own misfortunes and responsible for private self-affirmation, had to find a means of individual self-improvement. Therefore, the vast majority of concepts, analyzing alienation and identity crisis, are the educational utopias in which the authors are searching the pedagogical means of person self-perfecting. Such kind of search is limited by institutions of socialization (family, school, university), or by those areas of social life, which is closely linked to the process of education and upbringing (mass communication, propaganda, art, etc.). The necessity of pluralism of paradigms is grounded in the process of the new approaches developing to the subject of philosophy of education.