Logunova Liudmila Borisovna

The subject of the study in this article is education as a dynamic system, an institution for promoting socialization, functioning in a specific sociocultural context. The purpose of the study is to determine the key elements of an educational system adequate to the needs of the contemporary society. The authors employ a trans-disciplinary methodology based on the principles of consistency, evolutionism, historicism, dialectics and general scientific methodology. The study is based on the idea of education as a technology of public consciousness programming, a process of cultural production according to the demands of a specific society.

The educational system creates and appraises various techniques for shaping a certain image of the world and a person within it, a person within society, elaborates the principles of individual identity. Educational reforms are driven by historic challenges, political and economic transformations impossible without a shift in public consciousness. School becomes a sort of laboratory for social experimentation, testing the importance of innovations for society, the possibility of answering the new challenges and the potential risks. Based on the analysis of education in the Enlightenment project of industrial society the authors identify the foundations for a modern education model and the factors that determine the necessity of a transformation in higher and secondary school systems and in pedagogical practices.

The article provides an ethical examination of the conformity of universal moral values to the moral practice of the modern consumer society, represented by the conceptual metaphor “era of emptiness”, reflecting the meaning of crisis/ anomie of the controlling function of basic virtues and ethical rationalism as a way of justifying and translating them. The consumer society is viewed as a stage/form of global capitalism, the defining characteristic of which is militant individual and group egoism, destroying the social community of people, generating ethical dilemmas that reflect the basic conflicts of our time. The need to resolve these conflicts is determined by the implementation of an ethical turn in theory and moral practice, the essence of which is focusing on the emotional-volitional sphere of human life as the basis of moral action. The essential characteristic of the ethical turn is the formation of applied ethics, the penetration of ethical discourse into the methodology of sciences from economics to biology and medicine, into the practice of professional communities and organizations.

The study used a transdisciplinary methodology based on the principles of consistency, evolutionism, historicism, dialectics and general scientific methods. On the basis of the analysis, the directions of development of applied ethics, the possibility of using its tools in situations of moral choice are determined.