Impact of social knowledge on formation of tolerance towards people with disabilities

One of the main challenges of adaptation for disabled students in the institution of higher education is theproblem of intolerance of the social sense. This can be considered through the relation between consciousness and unconsciousness in people'spsyche. Social unconsciousness as an interpreting system is more ancient and typical for people, while consciousness is an acquiredsystem, formed along with the human development and socialization. Consciousness relies upon knowledge and rational interpreting mechanisms.Social unconsciousness has some irrational elements in its basis which were present in human psyche originally or formed in thecourse of life. Social unconsciousness of different social groups varies and produces different interpreting systems, which leads to differentinterpretation of information and further misunderstanding. Everything which is new, strange and different is unconsciously seen as hostile.It automatically triggers protection mechanisms and causes intolerance towards other social group members. In the consciousness of mostpeople, who are not disabled, the latter are perceived as "strange", "different", "unlike", which provokes active intolerance mechanisms tohandicapped people. Unlike intolerance mechanisms, tolerance requires efforts to realize the phenomena of the world and bring them in accordancewith norms and morals of the society and thus turn on rational mechanisms. Being a rational but more limited system compared tosocial unconsciousness, consciousness is always seeking to enlarge its resources. It is possible by means of involvement of additional rationalcomponents such as information and knowledge. Overcoming irrational character of social unconsciousness raises a question on how to affectsocial unconsciousness of an individual to increase tolerance and decrease intolerance. This is the issue typical for the place in the communityand education possibilities of the handicapped. The most adequate solution of the problem is to single out social knowledge as amain factor in forming tolerance, in particular towards the handicapped. New culture in the relationship with the handicapped suggests makinginformation about disability and disabled people available and understandable for healthy people aiming to eliminate negative stereotypesand to build culture of tolerance and cooperation.

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