Ideas about the meanings of education among students: socio-cultural peculiarities of self-regulation

Abstract

The article reveals the correlation of terminal (development of abilities, need for knowledge, general culture) and instrumental (diploma, opportunity to make a career, prestige) meanings of education. It based on a comparative analysis of the ideas of higher education among students and other groups of young people in education. The methodological basis of the study is the concept of self-regulation of the life of young people. An analysis of the connections between the terminal and instrumental meanings of education and other elements of the socio-cultural mechanism of self-regulation of life activity (archetypes, mental traits, value orientations towards knowledge, habitual attitudes, subcultural meanings), belonging to the basic types of cultures made it possible to determine the trends in attitudes towards education of student and student youth. The tendency to instrumentalize the value attitude to the education of university students and young people in general is stable. It was revealed that the meanings of education correlate less significantly with archetypes and mentality. Subcultural meanings as properties of a generation, containing various kinds of “activities” and elements of demonstrative behavior, have significant connections with the instrumental meanings of education and, on the contrary, in some cases their denial – with the terminal ones. A similar paradoxical relationship between the terminal and instrumental meanings of the education of student youth is also recorded in correlations with the denial of belonging to the innovative and spiritual types of basic culture, which significantly distinguishes it from student youth. As sociocultural factors in the formation of ideas about the meanings of education of student youth, the type of settlement, the level of income, the level of education of parents are singled out. Ideas about the meanings of education of university students are considered in relation to the institutional regulation of higher education. It is concluded that the steady trend of instrumentalizing the attitude of student youth to education is consistent with such a direction of purposeful regulation of higher education as the practice orientation of educational programs. Education is understood as a means of increasing the manageability of one’s life, which means increasing the level of social certainty.