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PERSONAL VALUE ORIENTATION
AS A BASIS OF THE PEDAGOGICAL PROCESS
Alexiy Moroz
Modern society can be easily described as a hedonistic society. The values of mainstream culture that are assiduously sought to be inculcated in our people have nothing to do with true spirituality. Moreover, they are fundamentally in conflict with the cultural and historical tradition of Orthodoxy, which has been the core of life of Russian people over millennia of their history. The pseudo values offered by the architects of the modern world as a basis for building a value system of young people are based on passions, vice and sin. They are essentially in conflict with all the Commandments of God and even can be referred to as proto-satanic.
While for a Christian the meaning of life is the "acquisition of the Holy Spirit" and, thereby, the extirpation of passions and development of different virtues, which ultimately leads to the Godlikeliness, spiritual perfection and holiness, mainstream culture pursues completely different goals. The meaning of life is found in enjoyment and an endless quest for bodily and psychic pleasures. "Drink Pepsi - breath football" - this modern advertising slogan in many respects reflects the ideological orientations of the architects of modern society. Reducing man to the level of an animal and demeaning his original dignity down to reflexive experiences provide a powerful tool to manage a spiritless, culturally and psychically uniform crowd.
A person, who finds the meaning of life in a quest for enjoyments and pleasures and regards labor as a sad necessity, is an inveterate sinner. The door to spiritual enlightenment is closed to him, and he exists beyond its conceptual field. It is not without reason that many contemporary young people are simply unable to understand the meaning of such terms as "God", "spirituality", "God's grace", "sin", etc. Without having a proper spiritual idea about good and evil or truth and verity, they live outside these categories and follow primitive instincts in an endless quest for pleasures. Drug addicts and alcoholics are a typical, albeit somewhat grotesque, example of this category of young people. For a drug addict, to obtain a drug is good, while a failure to do so is evil. It absolutely does not matter what way he finds this doping, be it a theft, robbery or fraud. What matters is to obtain the long-awaited stuff and experience a euphoric pleasure. The same can be said about those who are enslaved by the passion of
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gambling on slot machines or playing computer games, obsessed by the passion of lust and sexual inversions, as well as different other types of sin.
A person without proper spiritual attitudes, who is brought up on the ideals of mainstream culture, misses the criteria of distinction between good and evil and becomes a slave of his passions and sin. It is impossible and useless to fight the consequences of vices encompassing modern society until the basic roots of these vices are destroyed. Consciousness determines being and spirituality determines consciousness. Therefore, when upbringing modern young people, we should primarily focus on developing in them correct spiritual attitudes and a moral and ethical basis of personality. What is fundamental for developing these moral structures, in our opinion, is to answer the questions about the meaning of life and the essence of death: Why do I live? Where am I heading to? What is death? What expects me beyond this created being? What will my atemporal being depend upon?
As Professor V.V. Zenkovsky puts it, "upbringing is addressed at a particular personality, whose destiny belongs to the eschatological future, which all of us become familiar with through death. You cannot live as if there was no death, nor cannot you bring up others as if there was no death. Every personality faces the eschatological subject matter as a subject matter of his own. It is only in this light that we can discover the profoundness and complexity of life problems. If upbringing is to touch the most essential and deepest things in man, then it is not enough to touch upon the problem of the Cross and the finite fate of a human being only rhetorically". Indeed, the answers to these key life questions form the basis for a person's value system. All other things are subdominant to and arise from them. For example, if a person relies on the Orthodox outlook in his life, the main motivation for his behavior will be the Commandments of God. He will regard all things that are in line with them as good and those in conflict with them as evil. The key commandments found in the New Testament involve love for God and man (your neighbor). The relationships, doings, feelings and emotions of a person with this value system will have purely spiritual orientation, subjecting material or physical aspect of being to higher spiritual interests. Even where this person is tempted by a sinful desire, the force of this lust is not irreversible for him. In such a case, a Christian will automatically get an understanding of sad consequences of the sin and the worthless value of pleasure which it brings compared to the harm it can cause. Even if due to some reasons the passion will induce man to commit a sin, this will be immediately followed
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by penance, because this doing will be clearly in dissonance with the entire structure of a Christian's personality.
This notion is confirmed by practical experience. Education institutions that adhere to the spiritual Orthodox orientation face almost no problems with drug addiction, alcoholism or prostitution among students. People brought up in the context of mainstream culture are not only under complete control of sin, but also unable to oppose it. This happens because sin orientation is prevailing in such person, while spiritual motivation is almost completely lacking. The complexity of modern society is also conditioned by the fact that apart from the above described two types of people, there is the third type, which represents the largest group of people. They are the majority of our compatriots who were brought up during the Soviet period. People with atheistic education represent a generation of a discontinued cultural and historical tradition. The majority of them arrived at Orthodoxy, but the past stereotypes of atheistic education and the system of psychic values remained unchanged. They recognize God's existence and the afterlife, visit church and pray, but the values of secular existence, nevertheless, continue to prevail in them. The orientations towards carnal pleasures - enjoyments, wealth, pride, fame seeking - represent the strongest motive of their activity. Without having assimilated or at least learned the spiritual values of Orthodoxy, they do not fully accept the hedonistic ideas either, and in some cases try to live as their conscience directs them. This leads to the so called "split personality”, inner psychic breakdown and development of a marginal personality. This is the personality who is not rooted in any cultural and historical tradition, has no clear outlook or spiritual and moral orientations. In real life this duality often manifests itself in psychic unbalance, aggression, irritability and discontent with everything. In essence, they are deeply unhappy people characterized by a folk proverb as "neither fish, nor flesh". It is an important task of Orthodox pedagogy to help such people to achieve integrity of their consciousness and, hence, happiness of being. The fact is that this type of personality is inherent not only in people of older or middle age. It is known that influence of parents, grandparents and other family members has the most powerful effect on the development of child's personality. The first spiritual, moral and ethical orientations are shaped in family and in many respects define the future development of man. The stereotypes of behavior and psychological perception of the surrounding reality often manifest themselves in middle and even older age. What was once said by mother or father and accepted by the child as an absolute truth continues to
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be the immovable truth (even if it is not objectively realized) in extreme old age, unless this truth is reconsidered at a new spiritual level. Therefore the marginal moral and ethical orientations, which were inherent in parents, continue and work in their children, which gives corresponding outcomes.
Taking into account all the above said, we find it necessary to shape clear moral and ethical orientations at all stages of the pedagogical processes without leaving any blind spots in the consciousness of an educatee. It is necessary to ensure that the Orthodox outlook is absorbed as a whole, the scale of spiritual and moral values is clearly structured and the cause-effect relations between good and evil doings are understood. It is necessary to develop in students the Orthodoxy-based understanding of the meaning of life and death and the clear criteria of good and evil based on the objective truth of the Commandments given in the New Testament.
Special attention should be paid to the positive spiritual orientations which are already available in children. Other positive qualities should be developed in reliance on these orientations. Great Russian teacher Ushinsky wrote: "Hence, there is a pedagogical rule: first, infuse into the child's soul positive inclinations conformable to the standard; then, as the deviations appear, invoke feelings, whereupon add an understanding of morality ... Correspondingly, it is necessary to develop positively good inclinations without providing nutriment to evil ones" (ib., S. 208). According to Ushinsky, the goal of moral education should be as follows: "in extreme youth, shape the moral taste of a person, thereby dignifying his nature". The human soul abhors vacuum and the evil, which is seated in it in the form of different passions and vices, must be squeezed out of it by virtues. Rejection and criticism are not enough to correct the sinful inclinations. Ushinsky wrote: "Long moral instructions, especially monotonous ones, are very harmful, because they accustom the soul to their powerlessness". Their consequences include: "Indifference, lack of emotions and easily achievable self-comfort, which can be the symptoms of a complete failure in moral education".
It is necessary to demonstrate virtue, opposing it to vice, and create all the necessary conditions for developing it. In doing so, we should rely on the pedagogical principles of consciousness and initiative. The soul of every person, being in essence a Christian, intuitively feels and sympathizes with the truth. I gave lectures and discussions to very different, often unprepared audiences. Let me share the following impressions. When young people, especially children, heard a speech filled with the God's
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grace of the Scripture, they reacted openly to it, displayed vivid interest in it and asked many questions.
The only possibility to oppose the tenth wave of mainstream culture with its lack of spirituality and morality is to rely on the cultural and historical tradition of Orthodoxy and develop a personality, whose value system is built on the Christian Commandments.
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