5.1. The concept of the content of education

Under the content of education they understand the system of knowledge, skills, ways of activity, attitudes, qualities and personality traits that the younger generation must master in accordance with the goals and objectives set. From this definition it follows that the content of education reflects its goal and objectives, is aimed at their optimal achievement and ensures the readiness of the emerging personality to the optimal entry into society. The content of education is focused on the development of the individual in accordance with the requirements that are imposed on a person by society, the state and the world as a whole at a given historical stage of its development. Thus, in practical terms, the content of education can be represented by three interrelated subsystems:

1) the moral concepts about nature, society and man, which the pupil must acquire;

2) habits acquired in the course of various activities and reflecting the norms of behavior adopted in society;

3) moral feelings, expressing a conscious individual-personal attitude of the pupil to one or another side of the surrounding reality, the world of people and oneself.

Due to the diversity of educational concepts and the multiplicity of their corresponding goals and objectives, modern pedagogical theory and practice have developed different approaches to the consideration of the content of education. To date, four approaches to the definition of this concept are most common.

The first approach is connected with the understanding of education as a process of managing the development of a child, aimed at positive changes in his views, motives and real actions (I. S. Marienko). Within the framework of this approach, educational tasks are focused on the formation of:

• the personality of the pupil as a citizen of the world and the country, a representative of a particular nationality, a resident of a particular locality, a member of society and family {patriotic education);

• intellectual culture of the person, persistent cognitive interest, the need to expand their horizons, constantly replenish knowledge (mental education);

• the spiritual culture of the individual as a set of norms and rules of behavior adopted in society, on the street, in the family, in the school {moral education);

• the need for the pupil to master the manifestations of a universal culture at the individual-personal level (aesthetic education);

• needs for a healthy lifestyle (physical education) (for more on this, see 5.2).

The second approach is connected with the understanding of education as a means of cultural transmission (O. S. Gazman, A. V. Ivanov). According to this approach, education should be aimed at the formation of a basic culture of the individual, which is understood as the achievement of a certain harmony by the personality, ensuring a full-fledged social life and work, as well as personal psychological comfort. From the standpoint of this approach, the content of education is aimed at the formation of the following basic cultures of the individual: life self-determination; family relationships; economic and labor culture; political, democratic and legal; intellectual, moral and communication culture; environmental, artistic, physical (for more on this, see 5.3).

The third approach is connected with the understanding of education as a component of socialization (I. A. Kolesnikova, L. S. Nagavkina, E. N. Baryshnikov). With this approach, the goal of education is to prepare the younger generation to participate in a complex system of social relations that have developed in the economic, political and spiritual spheres. In accordance with this, the social roles that a person must master in order to realize themselves in the social relations system (family man, member of children’s, teenage, youth community, student, patriot of his city, Russian, person of peace, person-creator ) (for more on this, see 5.4).

The fourth approach is connected with the understanding of upbringing as the formation of a person’s value relation to the world, knowledge of the world and interaction with it (N. E. Shchurkova). From the standpoint of this approach, the content of upbringing is an activity in which the student, together with the teacher, knows the world, interacts with the world, and tries to love it. The main values ​​of this approach are:

• pedagogical view on education from the standpoint of universal culture;

• pedagogical understanding of the components of the educational process as the development, assimilation and appropriation of the world by a growing child entering this world at the level of modern culture;

• determination of the content of the educational process as a system of attitudes towards the values ​​of a decent life for a decent person, and knowledge and skills as a means of a person’s value-based relationship to the world and with the world;

• maximum expansion of the field of educational process to the whole sphere of the child’s life;

• step-by-step unfolding of life problems during the development of the child’s personality as a subject of his own life;

• philosophical and pedagogical understanding of the content of the life of a worthy person as an endless chain of eternal problems of life, the solution of which does not exhaust the problem, but puts a person in front of a number of new endless problems (see 5.5 for more details).

The considered approaches do not contradict each other, but characterize education from different sides. Knowledge of these approaches will help the educator to fully evaluate the content of the educational process and choose his own way of working with the team. In addition, the problem of the content of upbringing finds practical expression and really arises when drawing up a program of educational work with schoolchildren.