requirements for graduates of higher education institutions all of which are increasingly
active and conscious actors of social transformation practices. Accordingly, the
requirements for the quality of education are increasing, as modern specialist should not
only have professional knowledge and formal skills, technological techniques in one or
another sphere of application of his work, but also be capable of non-standard, creative,
innovative thinking, qualitatively improve production, organizational, management and
other processes and types of work, reconstruct them according to new principles that
meet the requirements of time.
Therefore, it is no coincidence that among the leading concepts of education which
are intensively developed in modern Western theory and are the methodological basis
of the competence approach the following are available:
- structuralism (B. Berstein, P. Burdy, and others) which justifies that the code of
knowledge acts as a defining principle that forms differences in worldviews, social
identification and a variety of knowledge [6];
- the new sociology of education (Brown, Wexler, Gorbit, Girox, Mannheim,
Sharp, Halsy, and others) which introduces the principle of critical reflection of
scientific knowledge and interprets higher education not only as masking the ideology
of group interests in the form of objective knowledge or curriculum, as well as a channel
for reproduction of social patterns of inequality manifested in the differences in
individual achievement in higher education;
- critical sociology (M. Yang et al.) which substantiates that modern higher
education is a complex socio-cultural process that is not limited to the system of formal
acquisition of knowledge since it reveals new trends. Among them, firstly,
commercialization which directs the efforts of those who learn, on the knowledge
required for the basic profession, and promotes the priority of a pragmatic approach to
higher education, the purpose of which is the training of professionals who can
successfully withstand competition in the labour market. Secondly, individualization
which focuses on learning in the context of lifelong learning all forms of which are
taken by institutions of formal education from the outside.
A more careful analysis of the concepts of education, given above, has allowed to
highlight five substantive aspects of the concept “higher education” which is currently
serving as a resource for training such specialists who, in the context of new economic
thinking, are capable of updating pragmatic assessment of available facilities and
capabilities in the context of new economic thinking, to radically transform, reconstruct
objects of its professional reality by new principles. Among them are:
- higher education as a value pointing to the unity of the personal, state and social
components;
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