Ontological Structures of the Modern Educational Process

Abstract

Three fundamental provisions are introduced here, which lay the basis for studying the ontological structures of modern education: 1) education is what remains when everything that has been learned is forgotten; 2) education is achieved through independent work, while what they can teach one in schools and universities only helps to get it; 3) a well-oiled infrastructure of the cognition process is needed, i.e. auxiliary areas and resources for the formation of the structures under consideration. These provisions are investigated in the context of the concept of dynamic limit equilibria and the world coordinate system based on it. Of the four concepts of consciousness singled out by V.A. Lektorsky, the paper used the first two: identifying consciousness with knowledge and considering intentionality (focus on a certain object) as the main sign of consciousness. When re-assembling knowledge, two main trends are possible: 1) purification, which presupposes discarding of all that is superfluous (it can have to do with the degradation of the subject, his or her reorientation to completely new knowledge, or the need to prepare memory for perceiving more knowledge); 2) self-organization of the acquired knowledge, which is at the cutting edge of contemporary research. The latter trend has several important features. From the point of view of dynamic limit equilibria, knowledge tends to close itself into a stable optimal system, pushing everything unnecessary and secondary to the periphery. Moreover, in the process of self-organization knowledge gravitates towards increasingly accurate identifications that clarify the connections between
its key elements. Further, the paper dwells on the characteristics of three main components of the classical educational-hermeneutic triangle teacher–text–student and their interaction with each other. In addition, the hermeneutic circles of teaching methodology are analysed: 1) preparation–teaching–perception; 2) course and its parts, course and its context. Cognitive structures and objects of consciousness, as well as catalyzation and self-organization of educational activity are also considered in the paper.