Postmodern human identity in relationship education
Introduction
In the life and development of human society, education plays an extremely important role. It enables the cultural heritage created by previous generations to be preserved and further multiplied. Education contributes to social development and progress because without it, each generation would essentially start from scratch and merely repeat the life of the preceding generation, as is the case with animals. However, human society continually develops precisely thanks to education. Education is also one of the essential features that distinguish life in human society from the life of other living beings.
Social-educational activity develops social skills for effective integration into the family, school, and especially human society. It emphasizes social skills that facilitate a person's life in society. It is an important activity for positive integration. Social activity is activity focused on developing a person's social skills for effective participation in the family, school, and workplace, monitoring and evaluating children's behavior using methods, techniques, and procedures corresponding to current knowledge of social pedagogy and the state of practice, social counseling, sociotherapy, and the use of diagnostic methods of social pedagogy. Education is the professional (purposeful and expert) development of positive potentials, mental functions, and processes of the human personality. Education is a fundamental concept in pedagogical theory and pedagogical practice. At the same time, it is one of the most complex processes in human society.
If we seek an answer to the question of what caused humans to break free from the laws of the animal kingdom and begin to act in a typically human way, we must rely primarily on the considerations of scientists and various findings. We have almost no accounts of what education looked like in the earliest stages of human society's development. This is partly because writing, as one of the means of historical knowledge through which we could obtain primary evidence, emerged relatively late.
The origin of education as a typically social activity was first explained from a biological perspective. Scientists compared animal behavior with human behavior and pointed out that certain signs of educational influence can already be found in animals. Other authors attempted to explain the foundation of social educational activity from a psychological perspective. They drew upon various properties of the human psyche that gradually manifested during development, and humans learned to transmit them to others (Schavel, 2009). While the separation of humans from the animal kingdom took hundreds of thousands of years, social development from the moment humans began working proceeded relatively quickly.
In the process of work activity, the need for education as a specifically human activity arose. It was precisely in this activity that humans demonstrated an ability unparalleled in the entire animal kingdom: the ability to purposefully and systematically transmit their experiences. They gradually changed their relationship to the environment and created their own new social environment. However, the practical need to prepare each individual for life and work in a social unit such as the family, tribe, or nation did not remain at the same level (Čáp, 1996, p. 34).
The history of education in primitive communal society was focused on transmitting knowledge from adults to children that was necessary for the preservation of life and for the development of offspring. In primitive communal society, education took place through simple imitation and children's participation in the work activities of adults. At this stage, people lived together in groups, worked together to obtain sustenance, cared for children collectively, and there were no differences among them.
Human individuals were raised by the entire society; their preparation for life, though simple, was comprehensive, and their rights and duties were equal. Primitive communal society gradually disintegrated, and with it ended the initial unified, comprehensive, and universal education of all members of society. From then on, it became the rule that most children received only the most basic education, narrowed to preparation for work, while a smaller group of children from the ruling class received a much more careful education (Laca, 2010, p. 298). Preparation for initiations was the beginning of institutional education, though it did not yet have a fixed system; the simplicity of life did not require it.
Education in slave society resulted in the development of work activity and tools, and the social development of productive forces led to the emergence of the social division of labor. This meant that physical and mental labor became separated, private property emerged, and society was divided into classes. The class character of society first arose in slave society.
Education in ancient Greece was based on the nobility and the peasantry. Thus, two basic conventions in the education of individuals were formed, conditioned by the distinct character of each estate and very different from each other. These forms also dominated the strictly aristocratic military state of Sparta and the free democratic legal state, whose representative was Athens. Education in Sparta had a military character, was governed by military discipline, and was entirely public.
Original education in ancient Rome was based on family education. Roman education and pedagogy excelled in rhetoric and state patriotism, but other philosophical views from Greece also permeated it. A specific feature of Roman education was knowledge of Roman laws, which marked the beginning of an emphasis on legal education and the formation of legal awareness among citizens in the history of pedagogy. The last period of the Roman Empire is characterized by the increasing influence of Christianity on education and learning.
In the period of emerging capitalism, new demands for education arose, and thus education began to change as well. The developing industry of the 18th and 19th centuries required that those working in factories be at least partially educated and prepared for more demanding ways of work. Therefore, many countries introduced compulsory elementary schooling, which also applied to the children of workers and landless peasants. The class and estate character of education manifested even more prominently in the so-called dualism of the education system.
Education in socialist society was long established in our society, and its basic principles were uniformity, state-run and free education based on the Marxist-Leninist scientific worldview, and the unity of education and instruction.
As we can see, education originated and developed in the process of human society; it was and is determined by social needs and interests. Its goals, forms, and means changed with changes in the social system. Education is the transmission of abilities, skills, and attitudes that exist in a given society and are considered important for its continuation and further development to subsequent generations. Education or instruction is part of educational reality, an activity aimed at acquiring and improving a person's abilities and qualities. Education is the influencing of human learning and socialization processes with the aim of transforming a person in all aspects, with the goal of reshaping a person from a social being into a cultural being (Pasternáková, 2010).
The changes that society underwent throughout its history also affected education. They influenced its goal, procedures, and content. Education developed simultaneously with the development of society, and therefore we designate it as a historical phenomenon. When we trace the development of education, we proceed from the division of human society's development into basic periods determined by the degree of development of productive relations.
Accordingly, in the history of education we speak successively of education in prehistory, antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern era, or more specifically of education in primitive communal society, education in slave society in the great slave empires such as ancient Rome and ancient Greece, then the education of the first Christians, education in feudal society, in capitalist, socialist, up to the present.
Society is one of the most frequently used concepts in everyday life, especially in science. What is society? How should it be understood? Society is a concept in the broadest sense of the word. It is synonymous with humanity as a whole, with the human race, with the largest social group to which a person can belong. Society is a historical community of people characterized by mutual relationships, existing in a certain territory and typical of a given historical period. In antiquity, society was conceived at the level of the polis, which was identical with civil society. Aristotle defined it as polis - a self-sufficient community. He posed the fundamental question: What constitutes its essence, the origin of its unity, the conditions of its continuity in time. In the Middle Ages, society was not distinguished from political community. The individual belonged to the church and to a particular political community. The family held a specific position as a natural group. The distinction between the political community represented by the state and society appeared only in the Renaissance and culminated in the 17th to 19th centuries. At that time, the state was perceived as essential, yet only as a segment of society. G. W. F. Hegel created the concept of civil society as a counterweight to the concept of the state. According to K. Marx, society is not the sum of individuals, but the sum of social relations between them. The most important are productive relations (Keller, 1997, p. 31). Instead of the abstract concept of society, K. Marx uses the term socio-economic formation. This concept is meant to precisely capture the concrete historical type of arrangement of social relations.
Currently, various conceptions of society exist in sociological literature. For example, society as a structure, i.e., a network of social institutions; society as recurrence, i.e., repetition and permanent resolution of survival, meaning patterns of behavior, values, and norms that crystallize in institutions and operate long-term. This can partially eliminate socio-pathological phenomena.
Sociology uses the concept of society in connection with more specific designations – global society, modern society, traditional society, etc. In general, the understanding of the concept of society depends on the basic theoretical starting points of the user. Society is the result of long-term historical, natural, and social development, which is still evolving. This can be seen in the process of societal modernization in the current period.
The development and modernization of society in recent decades raises many disturbing questions: How can we understand the development of society, marked by constant processes of modernization and at the same time accompanied by growing anomie? Is there a relationship between the two processes? Is the increasing number of socio-pathological phenomena an inevitable companion of modernization, whose institutional principles lie in the democratization of society, the market economy, and the emergence of civil society, where postmodern society plays a major role?
Postmodern society is often characterized as pluralistic. The concept of postmodern society denotes the spiritual and social climate of contemporary human society. There is a certain effort toward reflection. This society is against uniformity. Often also against all functioning instruments of social control. It rejects the absolute in any area – in art, politics, interpersonal and social relations. It places emphasis on imaginative feelings in which heterogeneous worlds intertwine and which lead toward the division of power and the support of the diversity of contemporary life, cultural and scientific conceptions, and social relations.
Man and Postmodern Society
Postmodern society is the society after the modern stage of society, which is conceived and derived from modernism. It distrusts "constructive rationalism," rejects the idea of progress, of a predictable and planned future. It is a society without a universal value system, a society threatened by various catastrophes (economic, ecological, social, etc.). It is an expression of society's self-reflection in a state of crisis. The German philosopher R. Panwitz used the term postmodern as early as 1917. In contrast to the modern decadent and nihilist, it places at the forefront the "sportively" toughened, nationally conscious, and religiously awakened "postmodern" man, who shapes society in his own image (Bauman, 2002, p. 29). Postmodern society designates the present stage of the development of civic-social culture as postmodern – a period of transition from nation-state thinking and interests toward global interaction.
In postmodern society, we often encounter various social problems that are permitted and in some cases even accepted, e.g., drug legalization, various forms of coexistence between people, the destigmatization of sex, and others. Freedom also plays a major role. Today's people, whether youth or adults, can easily be characterized as struggling with their own awareness of free decision-making and traditional cultural heritage, religion, morality or ethics, education, etc.
Human freedom in today's society has long ceased to mean unlimitedness, but rather the proper response to the realities of life according to one's own judgment with full awareness of responsibility. Thus, today's free person can truly ask why society should command or forbid them this or that just because someone says so (Grenz, 1997).
And they do not understand at all why they should confront their life and actions according to something they disagree with. Is this not rather a question of secularism, globalization, and above all postmodern society as a threat to people? Is it a desperate cry over the realized fact of losing control over human individuals in society, where the problem appears in the form of socio-pathological phenomena in postmodernity. "The problem of postmodernism lies in managing plurality, heterogeneity, and other ways of life, values, life experiences, especially in scientific disciplines and overall societal developmental trends, so that it contributes to the dignity of human life in human society" (Mühlpachr, 2008, p. 18). Few people realize the risks and dangers of the postmodern phenomenon for the direction of human society. We think that even postmodernism is not the key solution for the development of our culture and society, because elements of postmodern thinking negatively affect not only the general socio-cultural level of social life but also special areas such as morality, school, politics, etc.
Sometimes it seems as if man, amid the rapid development of knowledge, science, and technology, has forgotten about himself. And yet it is only he who gives meaning to the exploration of the universe, discoveries in genetics, progress in medicine, and new technological achievements.
What actually is this thing called man? And since when has man been human, whether as the human race or as an individual? Does it even make sense to ask this, or is it just some useless philosophical speculation? What do we get from it? What does postmodernity and the education of man have to do with these questions?
The question of who or what man is has accompanied all of history, yet it has never seemed as problematic as it does today. Throughout history, many conceptions have emerged, various definitions have been formulated, but today we are faced with the question of whether it is even possible to discuss the problem of "what is man." Here we already encounter the first contradiction. Christianity claims to have a clear answer to the question of man. The Bible is, in a certain sense, entirely about man, about his origin, about the meaning of his existence. "An objective view of the human personality can only arise as a result of a comprehensive approach (Hučík et. al., 2009, p. 7)."
Postmodernity rather leans toward the view that this cannot be answered, and even that the question itself does not have much meaning. The modern conception assumed the existence of an objective world and the possibility of its cognition. Postmodernity renounces the concept of reality and thus also rejects the possibility of objective cognition (Wojtyła, 2001, p. 45).
Today we often hear that everyone is "themselves", has "their own truth", because they live in "their own world", which no one else can see into. Thus, everyone can interpret "truth" in their own way, resulting in an understanding of "tolerance" whereby not only does every person, as a free human being, have the right to their opinion, but – and this is counterproductive – every opinion, insofar as it is expressed by a person, has the same claim to validity. Then anyone who is convinced of the correctness of their opinion or stance is declared intolerant because they dare to claim that someone else is wrong. "Tolerance" understood in this way ultimately means having no opinion at all, because why would I need an opinion that has no claim to validity since it must not debate another opinion (Coreth, 1996). If everyone has the same truth, then truth actually does not exist. But life brings many situations that force us not to be satisfied with this, but to seek an answer. These are situations in which we must somehow decide, and this decision has serious consequences. These are situations in which, figuratively or literally, "life is at stake."
What is man? If we want to seek an answer to this question at all, we must start from the assumption that it is possible. This is connected with such complex philosophical problems as, for example, the question of what actually is the object of our cognition. Is it the real world around us, or only the contents, states, or products of our consciousness? Maxim Gorky wrote: "Man – that sounds proud." But why? How much good he has done! He has created amazing, admirable, and magnificent works. He has walked on the Moon, dives into the depths of the sea and into the deep secrets of the structure of matter. He explores cosmic distances and shortens distances between people on Earth. He has managed to cure insidious diseases and create admirable works of art. But also how much evil, injustice, and cruelty do human history know! We have long been capable of destroying all life on Earth. We know how to use scientific knowledge to torture others and brainwash people. Some try to explain both phenomena through evolutionary laws and the struggle for survival.
The history of human self-confidence represents a magnificent fresco that man painted in situations of unshakeable self-assurance as well as anxious uncertainty. The influx of knowledge from the sciences of man and his certainty that he knows the truth about himself were not in direct proportion. He remained a mystery to himself, because man felt that his limited possibilities extended into infinity (J. Jaspers). In times of uncertainty, the question "What is man?" gained intensity. Its resolution – i.e., the elaboration of connections between philosophy "and society" and the man who has become uncertain, who asks questions and who finds these connections – was mostly undertaken by experts with varying attitudes toward the systems of traditional philosophy and human society.
Conclusion
Modern social mobility brings, alongside radical plurality, a readiness for change and openness to something new. However, it also brings reserve toward traditions that claim acceptance and binding force. Postmodern thinking affects all people – both the young and the elderly in today's society. We therefore try to point toward a solution for a wide range of people. Because they too must know how to find their place and their long-term positive goal. They must know how to progress, to perceive what is valuable (what is good, what benefits society), and they must not change their taste under postmodern pressure. It is very difficult to clearly capture the issue of the postmodern phenomenon regarding social pathology and to present unambiguous aprioristic features, because a clear picture of postmodernism is complicated by conceptual pluralism about society. It is also not easy to provide a comprehensive basic characterization of postmodern society, because the entire genesis of postmodernism and its development is very broad.
In every period of its existence, society has striven to maintain control over education and to ensure that educational influence supported the ruling class. The results that society achieved through its educational influence led to the conviction that the power of education is so enormous that through it one can influence not only every individual but also society as a whole. In the development of pedagogical thought, works emerged that dealt with the influence of education on society for the better.
Authors: PaedDr. Slavomír Laca, PhD. Thlic. Peter Laca Bibliography
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Publications of the article author: PaedDr. Slavomír Laca, PhD
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