Modernization Of Dagestan Education: Expectations And Realities

Abstract

The paper examines the factors hindering the improvement of the Dagestan education system. Its main vice is its adherence to the European technocratic paradigm, modern Bologna system, once popular in the West. Following it, domestic education is currently overly enthusiastic about information technology and learning assessments integrated in the educational process, prevailing technicalization and technologization of intellectual activity, formalization of thinking. Emasculating humanistic content from academic disciplines is in line with displacing the educational component from education, and impoverishing cultural and educational environment in higher and secondary education institutions nationwide. How can we preserve a complex and harmonious combination of two types of cultures in modernizing education – unified industrial and traditional, ethnically original? To what extent can the goals of educating the younger generation in the spirit of patriotism, priority of universal human values, protection and development of national cultures in the education system be practically implemented in the modern educational policy of Russia and Dagestan? Do the fundamentals of modernization of domestic education meet the expectations of citizens? How should we mold an educational policy for preserving the specific regional educational environment within the Russian and world educational environment? These are the questions addressed in the paper.

Keywords: Dagestan, educational environment, ethnoculture, information technocracy, modernization

Introduction

Dagestan is not a typical subject of the Russian Federation, but, being a part of single national educational environment for more than a century, it shares its achievements and problems. In addition, standing out in the federal education system with its ethno-confessional character, Dagestan education calls for the scientific and pedagogical community to turn to a number of key modernization problems of recent decades.

Since the mid-90s of the twentieth century, the core course in Russian educational policy has been defined by the Federal Program on Development of Education in Russia and amendments to the law of the Russian Federation On Education. This course assumed a “humanistic project” of educational activities: educating the younger generation in the spirit of patriotism, priority of universal values, protection and development of national cultures, regional cultural traditions and characteristics of multinational Russia, etc. in the education system (Rudakova, 2012, p. 136).

Problem Statement

How feasible are these basic markers and other goals outlined by the law and the program in the modern educational policy of Russia? Do they meet the expectations for modernization of national education, which has been subject to crisis deformations in recent decades?

However, in fact, it is not easy to implement either scientists’ recommendations or Program goals and objectives in Russia and its regions. For national regions, the content of modernization is complicated by its cultural uncertainty. The same North Caucasus is a complex combination of two types of cultures – unified-industrial and ethnically original, traditionally oriented. In these socio-cultural conditions, a research team of well-known North Caucasian philosophers believes that the ideal model in this case should be a harmonious ensemble of modernization elements and ethnically determined stereotypes of behavior, lifestyle, customs, national characteristics of the worldview (Zhade et al., 2010).

An educational policy corresponding to such modernization of Russia is hampered not only by the difficulty in achieving this ideal model, but also by a number of other impacts hindering its implementation.

Key among these is violated integration of the economic system and the education system, the so-called “demographic cross” – a growing decline in the number of students, the obligations undertaken by the Russian Federation under the Bologna agreements, and finally, the policy of sequestering education funding (Polomoshnov, 2011, p. 26).

This situation is region-wide. The main failures of national educational policies, contrary to targeted focus, are that after the signing of the Bologna agreement, they became technocratically oriented, contravening the humanistic pedagogical vision. The paper seeks to draw special attention to this. Modern global trends for student-centered and culture-centric education are not implemented.

Research Questions

The real policy of modernization, or more precisely, its Russian components are ambiguously assessed by the scientific and pedagogical community. Say, the same Bologna system. Following it now in national education, with its excessive enthusiasm for information technology and assessment tools, does not keep within bounds. There is a kind of technicalization and technologization of thinking, when information and awareness of a person “began to replace his intellect, the ability to deeply comprehend the whole drama of life. Current practices of test unification do not fit the standards of social and humanitarian education, is not fully sensitive to its specific character” (Bilalov & Magomedov, 2013, p. 1866).

Unification and standardization of education, brought about by globalization and the Bologna process, reduces the pedagogical process to training of single-skilled staff, to development not of a person at large, but of his single abilities matching a particular division of labor. This narrow understanding of education must be overcome through its humanization, i.e., implementation of a human-shaping function: individual’s orientations towards culture, spirituality, intelligence (Zalibekova, 2003, p. 230).

With its obvious shortcomings, the Bologna process entailed radical changes in the entire educational environment of the country. The university educational environment should become a cultural and educational medium in which professional education is built as a tool for setting the tone for national existence, settling in national history and culture (Petrenko, 2007).

Purpose of the Study

The harmfulness of disruptive approaches to the development of cultural and educational environment at higher and secondary education institutions became apparent during the period of distance learning caused by the global coronavirus pandemic. Generally speaking, even without this attack on humanity, having moved to a planetary-electronic phase of the scientific and technological revolution, we face a situation of intensive use of information, both for good and for evil. Information can turn into a tool that throws off the state system. E-environment opens up great opportunities for numerous crimes both in the field of law and in the field of moral certainty. Internet addiction is widely discussed in some publications. Information technology is increasingly used to control and perform various manipulations with the consciousness of both individuals and society as a whole (Piven, 2018).

This is how Piven characterizes a pernicious side of modern technocracy. The author draws attention not so much to violations of the normal human cultural environment, but emphasizes the particular danger of technocracy for the intellectual development of the younger generation during the period of study. The idea of ​​the danger brought about by Internet education for traditional education is developed by Borisov (2011). Internet addiction, exaggerated role of technology in education, knowledge acquisition in secondary school largely focused on learning assessments and preparation for a unified state education, overlapped by the age characteristics of schoolchildren, like a tendency to mimic, focus on bright examples, increased suggestibility, highlight the problems of developing thinking in students in higher education (Borovinskaya, 2019).

However, besides prevailing Internet education and information technocracy, establishing a meaningful cultural environment is challenging in modernization of education. As for a natural vector to humanized education with its orientation towards culture, spirituality, and intelligence, it needs some clarification. Often, when it comes to the need to incorporate mental and cultural foundations of the peoples of Russia and Dagestan in the educational policy, it does not address or completely ignores their opposition to Western historical traditions and values. Bilalov (2015) says:

that Russian pedagogy and philosophy of education should guide the school away from such Western values ​​as absolute role of the rational in spiritual life, priority of practical success in human activity, overestimation of personal freedom and relatedly interpreted humanism, which in the West are already in the background, and in Eastern and Muslim cultures have never been primary values. (p. 172)

However, this is not true even for the Dagestan educational environment, because following the Bologna system, Russian regions promoted Bologna values ​​against historical traditions that have proved their value (Bilalov, 2015). “Fundamental values became first hostages of such educational policy – because if collective responsibility, respect for elders, and patriotism are primary values for Eastern and Muslim cultures, then for the West they are secondary or even insignificant” (Bilalov, 2014, p. 30). Belova also writes about the importance of the East and its culture for education and upbringing. Education should facilitate a person’s entry into the holistic culture, and in order to restore its “eastern field of consciousness” for a modern Russian, one cannot underestimate the life of that part of the wisdom that dates back to the Tatar communities, Confucian and Taoist ideas (Belova, 2011). The authors believe that the cultural and spiritual flows of the Arab, Turkic, and Iranian regions should be equally incorporated in national education.

The traditions of “developing” teaching were solid in the educational policy of the USSR. In general, “the Soviet school left us a huge positive experience: educational, methodological, administrative and educational. In this regard, it would be unfair to ignore the refraction of the Marxist-Leninist ideology in education into the original theoretical concepts that existed in the Soviet state. The most representative of them are the idea of ​​pedagogy of cooperation, Bibler’s school of dialogue of cultures, Ilyenkov’s concept of education (Bykovskaya, 2006). These ideas are remembered by the older generation of teaching staff in Dagestan and are being implemented in the pedagogical and educational culture.

Most Eastern countries do not accept the European version of technocratic modernization of education either. However, despite massive public criticism and negative attitude of most teachers, theorists and politicians, the principles of the Bologna system are stubbornly observed in the educational environment of Russia and post-Soviet countries. This happens despite the fact that the Chinese model of education is strongly opposed to the Bologna system supported by the European Union. The clash of these models forces the Bologna system to look for ways of autopoiesis, i.e. to preserve its vision and its impact on the educational process in the European Union; to determine stable centers (attractors) of the evolution in the educational system, to give it a direction based on its self-development; to create protective structures in the form of indigenization, hybridization, and others as a response to the threat of losing their authoritarianism (Punchenko, 2018). In many European countries, and in the USA, this system has greatly discredited itself. This is realized by all educational agents, besides the state, by all Russian citizens through the family and parental community, professional and pedagogical community, cultural, commercial and public institutions.

Research Methods

To strengthen the upbringing function of education, ethnic and national factor should be involved in educational policy. Its significance as a methodological demand is recognized by many multicultural regions of Russia and post-Soviet countries, and it is even present as a traditional formula in their educational policies. Considering preservation and development of human ethnicity, an important task of education, Shermukhamedova (2018) declares it a innovation aspect of the educational policy. Starting from students’ ethnicity, education should address all components of ethnic culture that affect the state of education: art, morality, law, politics, national customs, religion.

This depends on our modern interpretation of tradition that serves to preserve social, state, political, etc. order. In the most general form, we are impressed by the reconstruction of Fedorova’s interpretation of the tradition proposed by Ricoeur (1985). In her opinion, talking about tradition today means talking about the broadest pragmatic thinking, free from the sacralization of patterns of the past, thinking open for enriching the past with new meanings and symbolic significance discovered in the dialogue of cultures and traditions. In this regard, Ricoeur set before “responsible thinking” “two interrelated ‘ethico-political tasks’”. On the one hand, any of our expectations regarding the future ... must be determined, anchored in experience, and correlated with experience. On the other hand, we must fight against viewing the past solely as complete, unchanged; we should rediscover this past again and again, reviving unfulfilled tendencies in it (Fedorova, 2017). This interpretation of tradition is viewed as a methodological approach for this paper in the philosophical understanding of education as a social phenomenon and the place of ethnic culture in it..

Findings

The educational policy of Russia and its regions should be more decisively redesigned to encapsulate the humanistic pedagogical principles.

They constitute a diagram of human behavior in a typical life situation, characterized by a basic idea of ​​a high social mission of man, love for him, recognition of his importance as a person. This attitude is possible and necessary within a particular educational system designed to embrace the principles of humanization of education in modern conditions (Zhuk, 2007, p. 113).

This reorientation of the pedagogical process is closely connected not only with didactic improvements in education, but also with a sharp increase in the role of upbringing in education. Since the 1990s, upbringing weakened in Russian education, the center of which should be both society and the individual, self-actualization, and socialization of the student (Ponomarev, 2005). Indeed, ethnic culture in the space of globalization has shown its moral and anthropological value, its role in self-preservation of humanity (Drach et al., 2018).

Ethnocultural interaction, characterized by participation of subjects differing in ethnicity in systematic ethnocultural interactions, in order to cause a reciprocal expected behavior that involves the renewal of interaction (Bobryshova, 2009) for a multicultural polyethnic region, especially for Dagestan, appears to be significant factor in its development. As the cited author notes, ethnocultural interaction is pluralistic, relative and tolerant, its conductors are both public organizations (national-cultural autonomies, national-cultural centers, etc.) and authorities. Although education authorities in Russian society in recent decades have often been criticized, sometimes harshly, it is not amenable to reasonable reforms. The Education national project, the New School initiative, a network of federal universities are been implemented without competent sociological support, relying on the so-called “sociological flair" of education officials (Guskov, 2012). Ethnosocialization, ethnocultural details of various world views, and ethnopedagogy itself in conceptual integrity are insufficiently comprehended.

Conclusion

The Dagestan educational policy within the framework of the Russian education system has its own problems that need to be addressed. The educational policy in the republic proclaims as its goal the humanistic values ​​of the personal and cultural-centric concept. This is contrary to the Bologna trends that have prevailed in the Russian education system since the beginning of the twenty-first century. The most important problem is the opposition of the traditions of the peoples of Dagestan to Western norms in the field of spiritual, moral, and religious ideals.

In these conditions, for promising educational policy national regions should focus on and foster the ethno-cultural component of education. In this context, the idea of ​​ethnic and confessional diversity should be considered as a source of cultural development and creation of a unique intercultural communicative environment, in which each of the represented cultures receives a powerful impetus for its development in the process of interaction with each other (Mustafaev et al., 2015). That is why, the cultural and historical features of Russia and Dagestan should be considered as a resource for their modern educational policy. Another thing is which stages of cultural and historical development should be dominant, determining for the present and future. All in all, it is time to turn from unsubstantiated and unsupported appeals to cultural and historical sources and traditions to an effective policy.

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