4th Teaching & Education Conference, Venice

ANTHROPOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL EDUCATION

KONSTANTIN ZAVERSHINSKIY

Abstract:

The disintegration of the USSR political monolith into a varied range of national communities, educational systems and structures of governance has highlighted a necessity to properly theorize anthropological dimensions of political education. Ideological priorities of intellectual and power elites certainly played a role in a course of this transformation, but it is symbolic structures and patterns of political memory within the larger society in the former Soviet state that have determined and directed a course of evolution of emergent educational systems. A necessity to closely examine anthropological dimensions of political education arises due to emerging forms of communications and identification in a contemporary world that no longer fit traditional models of political association and political legitimation accepted within a paradigm of the classical political science. Today, social identities multiply, diverge and intermix due to new political codes, network structures, technological and geopolitical transformations, thereby requiring a creation of new approaches to theorizing and describing political education. A periodically emerging interest in concepts of ‘policy of memory’, ‘political memory’, and ‘politics of memory’ in the contemporary interdisciplinary socio-cultural studies is congruent with this theoretical take on a role of anthropological dimensions of political education. Theoretical modeling of the ideal in political education with a help of a ‘political memory’ concept enables us to answer questions of ‘how’ and ‘by what means’ the ideal attains a culturally and historically specific in a course of political and social transformations of educational systems. Scientific studies of political education of transition societies should not be implicated in a search for ‘value-based foundations’ of democratic process or declaring a value consensus as an essential condition of democracy but should identify processes of ‘setting up the time’ in symbolic engineering of the educational reality and to delineate temporal horizons for those who “trigger a particular action, put forward an idea or a self-presentation and by so doing make others react” (Luhmann). Of course, such an agenda of anthropological examination of ideal components of educational systems and political education of change requires further justification and operationalization. However, one can hope that theoretical foundations and methodologies of interdisciplinary research outlined in this paper can serve as a starting point for this work.

Keywords: anthropological dimensions, political education, political memory, political myth, educational policy

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