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THE INTEGRATION OF RELIGIOUS CULTURAL TRADITIONS IN THE LIFELONG EDUCATION OF RUSSIA
V. O. Gusakova
Integration is the backbone principle of didactics, intentionally linking various fields of knowledge and leading to qualitative and quantitative alterations in an educational process. Integration is of particular demand in today’s information society. The advantages of integrative learning are found in a wide range of opportunities for students to acquire various and different levels of knowledge, a humanization of students and their adaptation to the increasing informatization and technologization of the environment. This report focuses on Christian religious cultural traditions.
Despite the fact that integrative learning became the topic for active discussion only in the 20th century, its roots lie in ancient times. Integration is an essential prerequisite for education. According to historical sources, integration takes place already on the initial, non-categorical and not pedagogically formed stage of education, when two worldviews or two variants of interpretation of life as of an encoded cultural historical text meet - that of an adult and a child’s one. Let us consider an example of the Academy of Plato, where teaching combined (integrated) the ideas of Socrates and the Pythagoreans and more importantly, the intellectual development of a personality with spiritual upbringing, without which adequate education is impossible. The integration, executed in the process of education, implies not just the combination integrated fields by adults but also accumulated knowledge and experience. The quality assessment of the content of this experience is also necessary as well as the processing of it (generalization, synthesis, structuring) in order for it to be effectively transmitted to the younger generation. That is the importance of the integrative approach as a factor of the continuity of education.
The quality of education depends directly on: (a) the development, which is a reasonable "naturally artificial process of multidirectional changes, happening in a person...”1 (b) upbringing, which is the goal-oriented supervision of the human development for one’s acquisition of "existing fully in the material world and the spiritual world”2.
According to the anthropological paradigm, human development continues from three perspectives: biological, social and culturally symbolic. The latter defines the self development of a person and the person’s value of meaningful principles, which are implemented in an educational process.
1 Шестун Е. Протоиерей. Православная педагогика. М.: Про-Пресс, 2002. C. 31.
2 Op. cit.
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«A cultured person is an educated person, brought up on the basis of an image of a Human, an ideal of the given culture. Education as training, upbringing, and development is the main cultural form of human existence and underlies it»1. Culture, in its turn, has roots in ancient religious cults, containing different types of activities (playing, visual, etc.), leading, in different ways, to the transformation of reality. These cults prove that the desire to go beyond the visible and tangible world into the sphere of the transcendent is inherent in the nature of human consciousness. Cicero (106-43 B.C.) in the pagan era wrote: «Of all kinds of animals there is no one except man who has the slightest knowledge of God»2. Religion became a source of eternal values and that is why it gave a powerful impulse to the spiritual development of people. Therefore, at the foundation of any culture lies a religion (religious idea) with its own worldview, which is approved and reflected by the culture in the various fields of human activities (arts, science) and is passed through generations by traditions. It explains the stable status of religion as of a necessary life-asserting component that has an axiological system according to which culture is built in space and evolves over time.
Human behavior is regulated from birth by the religious cultural traditions established in one’s region (area, city, country) where the weight of the religious constituent depends on ideological, geopolitical, historical and other characteristics of the region. The very concept of education as a «form of social practice, transmitting social experience to a person so that he/she could gain an image, adequate to the given culture»3 has a point of contact with tradition, which also transmits the social and cultural experience. Moreover, the word "передача (peredacha)”, meaning "transfer” in the Russian language, has also the meaning "преданье (predanye)”, "tradi-tion». This word is definitely more profound in meaning and implies address to the testament of the ancestors, residing in another infinite space, and therefore alive forever. In conjunction with the word «sacred» tradition has a deep spiritual meaning and points out the preservation and dissemination of the Divine Revelation, that, according to St. Vincent of Lerins, «what is given to you, not invented by you» that «what you have received, rather
1 Слободчиков В.И., Исаев Е.И. Основы психологической антропологии. Учебное пособие для вузов. М.: Школа-Пресс, 1995.
2 Quotation: Епископ Варнава (Беляев). Основы искусства святости. Опыт изложения православной аскетики. http://pilotchart.narod.ru/text/Varnava/Varnava_2.htm
3 Словарь справочник по теории воспитательных систем / оост. П.В. Степанов. Изд. 2-е, доп. и перераб. М.: Педагогическое общество России, 2002
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than what you have invented»1. Christ himself spoke about it in this way: «For I have given to them the words which you gave me; and they have received them, and have known» (John 17:8). Here we have come close again to the religious component of tradition, in the spirit of which lifelong education is interpreted as a restoration of the image of God, given to man by God, but distorted (obscured) by people with their sins. Such education requires not only t external effects - teaching from the outside, but the continuous work within oneself -self-education so that the acquisition of «the knowledge about God» becomes «the cognition of God», which, in its turn, is the purpose of upbringing.
A person’s acquisition of knowledge starts with birth or, in the opinion of the supporters of perinatal pedagogy, in the womb and continues throughout the course of life. The person, reaching a certain age is a «set of knowledge (consciousness)”2. However, education without adequate development and intentional upbringing can bear to bitter fruit, when a person starts using the acquired knowledge unconsciously, applying it not for good, but for evil.
While knowledge acquisition belongs to the field of education, the exposure to national traditions, which are to a greater or lesser extent associated with religion, and always with culture, totally belongs to the field of upbringing and development. It is a tradition as a "form of self-organization, steadily reproduced from generation to generation by means of specific elements of culture (such as practice, ritual, ceremony, educational customs, teaching instructions, a set of the main texts, etc.) that leads a person to a certain way of self-development”3 that enables an organic comprehension of the objective environment and improvement of the subjective reality in it.
To summarize: firstly, integration is an essential prerequisite for education; secondly, the guarantee of continuity of education, human upbringing and development in society is provided by religious cultural traditions. Thus in conclusion: an integration of religious cultural traditions, implemented in the process of developing and upbringing a person, is an important requirement for the quality of lifelong education, contributing to a personal self-determination and building of a subjective reality in the social and cultural space.
1 Святой Викентий Лиринский. Памятные записки Перегрина. М., 1999. С. 15.
2 Владимир Волжский. Основания синтетической теории человека. СПб.: Ступени, 1997. - p. 15.
3 Захарченко М.В. Культура и образование в перспективе традиции. Традиция как предмет теоретического осмысления. Монография. - СПб: СПбАППО, 2007. С. 84.
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