What to Build the Theory of Upbringing for the “New Ukrainian School”

Abstract

The last decade, and especially the years after the Revolution of Dignity and the association of Ukraine with the EU, are marked by the rhetoric of the «European civilization choice» and «the return to European values». In the education system, it is reflected in the slogan «New Ukrainian School», built on values. The last slogan raises the question: is there a school (or certain type of school education), which is NOT built on values? Or, in other words: is it a school, which is not built on values, possible in general? The questions are obviously rhetorical, because without values education is impossible. It is the values that are the basis of any upbringing. Therefore, in the declared general sense, this slogan is not different from the former Soviet “datsi-bao”, such as “We will come to a victory of covictory of commmunist labour!”.

We need to be much more concrete in these cases. It seems to me, . It seems to me, that the major-that to me, that the major-that the major-the majorthe major--ity of the failures in the reforms in our country arise from the lack of concretization of common slogans – an alive consequence of the communist methodological heritage in this area. Therefore, the article deals with the ideological, philosophical and methodological foundations of constructing formal and ethical (moral) requirements for the system of school education in the USSR, the system of education and upbringing which Ukraine had inherited. In particular, this applies to the so-called “cosmocentric” ontology, the methodology of “dialectical materialism” (in particular, the so-called “unity of theory and practice”) and the class (so-called “proletarian”) - absolutely relativistic – ethics, constructed on it.So, the problem is the lack of a rational explanation and concretization of common slogans, in particular educational ones, which are put forward as a leit­motif of reforms in the school, and appeals to the concept of “values” that has emerged. As a result, we have absence of a corresponding scientific (philosophical) theory of values in Ukraine and a kind of vacuum in the field of ethics.

In my opinion, in this area, we should study the Polish experience, represented by a whole school of rational thinking in all branches of humanities, known as the Lviv-Warsaw School. Due to the traditions of this school, the Polish school system and society as a whole could resist the dialectical “brainwashing” and liberate itself from the dogmas of communist thinking, as far as carry out the necessary reforms, in particular, in the area of education, making it compatible with the educational systems of EU countries.

As an example, logically connected, based on experience and open to criticism, is the presentation of ethical issues in the theory of values of one of the last repre­sentatives of the Lviv-Warsaw School, Andrzej Gzegorczyk, presented in his paper “An attempt to describe the world of values and its ethical implications”.