Culturological views of K. D. Ushinskij

Abstract

The existing scientific discourse influences not only the modern science growth vector, but a certain view on the heritage of past perception as well. Most of the fundamental works that address the ideas of K. D. Ushinskij were written in Soviet times. Scrutinizing the philosophical and socio-political views of the great teacher, researchers, mainly aimed at detecting the manifestation of materialistic ideas. Owing to the search for new ways of developing the system of national education, contemporary authors appeal to K. D. Ushinskij’s concept of «nationality» (“narodnost”) more and more often. However, (due to the difference between the cultural vocabularies of the nineteenth and the twentyfirst centuries), for a proper interpretation of this concept, a complex analysis of K. D. Ushinskij’s views on the problems of theory and history is necessary. Such analysis has not been conducted before. By using the theoretical and methodological approaches of modern cultural studies, the paper aims at filling this lack of information by presenting an analytical overview of key culturological themes presented in the K. D. Ushinskij’s works. These are the semantic fields of the concepts «culture», «civilization», «nationality», the typology of cultures, the concept of the development of culture as a gradual transition from syncretism of all spheres of culture to their system-functional organization, the concept of a non-linear, multivariate process of human development and the historical unity of the various pedagogical systems’ of European origin. Although it is impossible to provide an exhaustive analysis of the entire heritage of K. D. Ushinskij in one article, still the results obtained could significantly extend the horizon of understanding K. D. Ushinskij’s philosophical and pedagogical ideas and might be beneficial to further researches both in the field of the history of pedagogy and the history of Russian cultural studies. Refs 22.