Crossroads of scientific and educational alternatives: monopoly on decision-making or cultivation of competence?

Abstract

Despite a fairly homogeneous way of functioning, our modernity is marked by different conceptual identities: some consider it as an epoch of simulation, others insist on the expediency of terminological equivalents such as risk society, butterfly and black swan effect, and some argue that a short period, criterion uncertainty and functional turbulence. Such a priori problems are dangerously supplemented by a decrease in the level of scientific thinking and the culture of managerial decision-making, as a result of which the horizon of seeing problem challenges and effective answers to them narrows. Even ambitious international institutions, projects and initiatives are increasingly playing the role of selfish interests of individuals and lobby groups through political marketing, populist, demagogic and manipulative tools. After all, the most threatening problem is the inability to determine the hierarchy of problems, dangers and challenges, resulting in the inability to build a symmetrical hierarchy of means to overcome existing problems. Such intellectual and managerial shortcomings are mostly tried to be eliminated by increasing the level of formalization, substituting quality criteria with purely quantitative criteria and giving priority to secondary factors. The consequence of such an incorrect perception of reality and paying hypertrophied attention to marginal tendencies is the exacerbation of real and priority problems, which more and more often become chronic, questioning the full functioning not only of science and education in Ukraine but also society and the state as a whole. In such circumstances, the prospects for cultivating competence and responsibility at all levels of management decision-making, and above all, mainly at the highest political level, become crucial.