underestimation of our peculiarities, in a broad sense, determined the catastrophic
consequences of the recent attempt to reform Russia in the Western way [14, p. 208].
Based on the current state of the education system and the desire of government
to "put" it into the traditional Western education model (or the Western model into the
traditional one) characteristics, which means to unify and subordinate it to the national
culture with all its features and, above all, values, it is necessary to examine the concept
of cultural archetype and emphasize the features of Western European and Eastern
European cultural archetypes, characterizing a national character, in more details.
Theories of cultural archetypes are a set of concepts, stated by K. Jung,
L. Vygotsky, J. Cooley, etc. Each person is born with needs, and begins to show his
activity, aimed at satisfying all of them. But there are many ways to satisfy each need,
which is interchangeable and practically gives approximately the same result. The task
of the social system is to orient a person towards certain methods, adopted in it, and,
thus, enable the possibility of collective actions.
As K. Kasyanova noted, one of the most responsible stages of a person’s
socialization is precisely the socialization of his motivation, and the essence of this
process is that human aspirations and inclinations are oriented towards certain
(sometimes very complex) objects. Cooley called these objects the "ideals"; in modern
sociology, they are more commonly called the values, and therefore the orientation to
them is called value orientations.
The social archetype is passed down through the generations; it exists in human’s
consciousness on a non-verbal, often on a not reflective level, but is “set” in him very
deeply, and the impulse excited by him can be very strong, as a rule, much stronger
than anything which can be awaken by any element of a developed reflexive structure
in the human psyche. According to the concept, stating here, the value structure of a
person is “immersed” in its archetypes, and those elements that contact a person with
the outside world - “typical actions” - constitute its ethnic character, underlying the
character of the individual [7].
Cultural archetypes are the archaic cultural prototypes, ideas-symbols about a
person, his place in the world and society; normative and value orientations, which set
patterns of human activity, sprouted through centuries-old layers of history, and
cultural transformations, and retained their meaning and sense in the normative and
value space of modern culture. Cultural archetypes are deep-seated cultural attitudes
of the "collective unconscious" that are difficult to change. The characteristic features
of cultural archetypes are stability and unawareness. People, as a rule, do not reflect on
their own cultural archetypes, which are aimed to preserve the cultural genotype of a
given nation. Cultural archetypes are introduced in all spheres of human activity, but
most of all, they are manifested in nation’s daily life [12].
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