The art of upbringing has the peculiarity that to almost everyone it seems a matter familiar and understandable, to others it is even easy, and the more understandable and easier it seems, the less a person knows him, theoretically or practically.
A person’s personality is formed and developed as a result of the influence of numerous factors, objective and subjective, natural and social, internal and external, independent and dependent on the will and consciousness of people acting spontaneously or according to certain goals. At the same time, man himself is not conceived as a passive creature that photographically reflects external influence. He acts as the subject of his own formation and development.
The purposeful formation and development of personality provides scientifically organized education.
Modern scientific ideas about education as a process of purposeful formation and development of personality have developed as a result of a long confrontation of a number of pedagogical ideas.
Describing upbringing only as an impact, P. P. Blonsky and A. P. Pinkevich did not yet consider it as a two-way process in which educators and foster children actively interact, as the organization of life and activities of pupils, their accumulation of social experience. The child in their concepts acted primarily as an object of education.
Modern pedagogy proceeds from the fact that the concept of the educational process does not reflect a direct impact, but the social interaction of the teacher and the educated person, their developing relations. The goals that the teacher sets himself appear as a certain product of the student's activity; The process of achieving these goals is also implemented through the organization of student activity; the assessment of the success of the teacher’s actions is again based on what are the qualitative changes in the consciousness and behavior of the student.
Every process is a combination of regular and sequential actions aimed at achieving a specific result. The main result of the educational process is the formation of a harmoniously developed, socially active person.
First, it should be noted that the concept of “upbringing” is used in various meanings: preparation of the younger generation for life, organized educational activities, etc. It is clear that in different cases the concept of “upbringing” will have different meanings. When it comes to specially organized educational activities, then usually this activity is associated with a certain impact, influence on the formed personality. That is why in some manuals on pedagogy, upbringing is traditionally defined as a specially organized pedagogical impact on a developing personality with the aim of forming social properties and qualities determined by society. In other works, the word “impact” as discordant and supposedly associated with the word “compulsion” is omitted and education is treated as a guide or management of personality development.
It is quite understandable that only under the condition that the educational impact causes the individual to have an internal positive reaction (attitude) and excites her own activity in working on herself, does she have an effective developing and formative influence on her. However, just about this in the above definitions of the essence of education is silent. It does not clarify the question of what this pedagogical impact should be, what character it should have, which often allows us to reduce it to various forms of external compulsion. Various elaborations and moralization.
Since this experience was generated by the labor and creative efforts of many generations of people, this means that in knowledge, practical skills, as well as in methods of scientific and artistic creation, social and spiritual relations, the results of their diverse labor, cognitive, and spiritual activities are “determined” living together. All this is very important for education. In order for the younger generations to “appropriate” this experience and make it their property, they must “distribute” it, that is, in essence, repeat it in one form or another, reproduce the activity contained in it and, making creative efforts, enrich it and already in more developed form to pass on to their descendants. Only through the mechanisms of one’s own activity, one’s own creative efforts and relationships does a person master social experience and its various structural components. It is easy to show this with an example: for students to learn the law of Archimedes, which is studied in the course of physics, they must in one form or another “distribute” the cognitive actions that the great scientist once performed, that is, reproduce, repeat, even under the guidance of a teacher, the way he went to the discovery of this law. In the same way, the mastery of public experience (knowledge, practical skills, methods of creative activity, etc.) takes place in other spheres of human life. It follows that the main purpose of upbringing is to, including a growing person in the activity of “distributing” various aspects of social experience, help him to reproduce this experience and thus develop social properties and qualities in himself, to develop himself as a person.
On this basis, education in philosophy is defined as the reproduction of social experience in an individual, as the translation of human culture into an individual form of existence. This definition is also useful for pedagogy. Bearing in mind the activity-oriented nature of upbringing. For pedagogy, however, it is very important that the measure of a person’s personal development depends not only on the very fact of his participation in the activity, but mainly on the degree of activity that he shows in this activity, as well as on its nature and orientation, which collectively called the attitude to activity. Let's look at some examples.
In the same class or student group, students learn math. Naturally, the conditions in which they work are approximately the same. However, the quality of their performance is often very different. Of course, this is affected by differences in their abilities, the level of previous training, but their attitude to the study of this subject plays an almost decisive role. Even with average abilities, a schoolchild or student can study very successfully if they show high cognitive activity and perseverance in mastering the material studied. Conversely, the lack of this activity, a passive attitude towards academic work, as a rule, lead to a lag.
No less essential for the development of personality is also the nature and orientation of the activity that the person manifests in the organized activity. You can, for example, be active and mutually supportive in work, striving to achieve the overall success of the class and school, or you can be active in order to only show yourself, earn praise and derive personal benefit for yourself. In the first case, a collectivist will be formed, in the second — an individualist or even a careerist. All this poses the challenge for each teacher — to constantly stimulate the activity of students in organized activities and to form a positive and healthy attitude towards it. It follows that it is the activity and attitude towards it that act as the determining factors in the education and personal development of the student.
These judgments, in my opinion, quite clearly reveal the essence of education and provide an opportunity to approach its definition. Education should be understood as a purposeful and consciously carried out pedagogical process of organizing and stimulating the diverse activities of the formed person to master public experience: knowledge, practical skills, ways of creative activity, social and spiritual relations.
The indicated approach to the interpretation of personality development was called the activity-related concept of education. The essence of this concept, as shown above, lies in the fact that only by including a growing person in various types of activities to master public experience and skillfully stimulating his activity (attitude) in this activity, he can be effectively educated. Without the organization of this activity and the formation of a positive attitude towards it, education is impossible. This is precisely the deep essence of this complex process.
References:
- Pidkasisty P. I. Pedagogical theories, systems, technologies. — M., 1995.
- Kharlamov I. F. “Pedagogy” Textbook for pedagogical institutes edited by Bobnyansky.
