Semiotic approach to dealing with the key contradictions of the modern system of education

The author believes that there are contradictions in the education system due to the incongruity of the "big metaphor" of education, through the prism of which it is thought of by the representatives of state power and the majority of the researchers, and the real mission of education in the modern context. Edusemiotics is a relatively new branch of the philosophy of education, which, in the author's view, has the potential for rethinking and resolving the contradictions that have accumulated in the system of modern Russian education. Having been established as a separate branch of the philosophy of education in the United States in 2010-2016, the semiotics of education is called upon to resist the Cartesian dualism of the subject and object, the labyrinths of analytical philosophy and the objective method of the modern era, which rejects human subjectivity as the only basis for the study of education. The author considers the principles of the edusemiotics to be topical at present: the primacy of the process of education over the result, the rejection of the principle of consistency and the logic of the "excluded middle" (i.e. the direct transfer of knowledge or skills from the teacher to the student, bypassing the stage of their interpretation), the holistic approach to education and the ethics of integration, continuity and experimental character of education. The article discusses the sharp contradictions revealed by the author at various levels of the education system (the level of the content of education, institutional and global levels) caused by the imbalance of the processes of integration and differentiation in education. At the level of the content of education, the conflict between differentiation and integration is expressed in the fragmentation of knowledge, on the one hand, and the objective necessity of forming an integral worldview of the individual on the other hand. In the educational system as a public institution, the discreteness of the level preparation comes into conflict with the continuity of continuous education in the knowledge society. And, finally, at the global level, the desire to preserve the identity of Russian educational traditions resists the objective tendencies of the internationalization of higher education according to the Western pattern. Then, from the standpoint of edusemiotics, an attempt is made to philosophize them. The author proposes and discusses options for resolving these contradictions. The author comes to the conclusion that the semiotics of education has the potential for formulating a new metaphor for education that views education as a value, process and result; applies to a holistic, integrative approach to determining the outcome of education; pays attention to all the levels of education: pragmatic, social and existential; and, finally, takes into account the cultural appropriateness of education.

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