Cognitive management in the structure of education and science: philosophical and methodological aspects

Cognitive management for the purposes of this paper is part of the contemporary discourse on education involved in the field of economy and information today. Management of knowledge and competence is the main task of the institutions as well as the applied knowledge is an indispensable requirement to universities as an assessment of their effectiveness. Economic discourse confidently enters universities and begins to determine the new nature of the challenges of the system. We propose to begin from the definition of a manager responsible for this system. We can talk about managing where there is a pluralistic environment only. The need for management is established by a competitive environment, but if such an environment is absent, there is no necessity of management in the functional sense. Competition in this case requires not only the focus on the management of the environment, but most importantly on the ability to choose the target market and even generate it. That is, the function of educational institutions is not only increasing knowledge, but also determining and shaping those who are consumers of this knowledge. If translated into the language of economy, it is a matter of marketing. There is a need to decide what services to offer and what competencies are needed and who needs them. Theoretically, we could assume that the demand can be generated either by external environment, or it can be formed within the educational and scientific system. If we assume that educational institutions should follow the needs of the society, the essence of all innovation will be reduced to what would the consumer market come up with to sell. Obviously, all this contributes to the dominance of instrumental reason. But the product of education and science can not be measured in terms of immediate commercial benefits, as it is often not able to produce direct effect. It is also necessary to remember that education is part of the society, whose structure is not static. In that case, universities could not become a tool for achieving external purposes, but a backbone element in the construction of the social landscape. What is cognitive management? It may be, firstly, the organization of the activity of individuals and their interactions (participation in the creation of social networks), and, second, it may be the discovery of new intellectual and educational opportunities and ways to achieve them. Therefore, the function of a "cognitive manager" is to restructure the environment to release or create channels that ensure the production of knowledge. The meaning of this production is not only the knowledge which is adjusted for current needs, but also the ability of knowledge to reformat the environment. That is, we should try to use a discourse that is not constituted by the idea of adapting of the system or adaptation of the organism to the environment, but it should be the idea of environment conversion by the system or by the body. And we need to see what opportunities open up with this approach. Then the discourse of the market should be considered only as a tool to enable this displacement, but not as an expression of the goals of the existence of scientific and educational complex.

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