Pragmatic Liberalism and Modernization of Upbringing

Alexander Sidorkin - Ph.D., Director, Department of Educational Programmes, Institute of Education, National Research University - Higher School of Economics. Address: 13, Milyutinsky lane, Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: asidorkin@hse.ruUpbringing is regarded as a purposeful training to teach human values. By definition, upbringing engages the deep-lying moral attitudes of people, the moral and cultural values that have always been disputed by the society. Upbringing inevitably involves conflicts; moreover, its social utility is hard to measure. These two factors combined, without active interference of the State, may gradually kill the upbringing practices, which is far not the best possible option for the national policy. First, in this case general education school would stop existing as a social organization. Schools with stronger educational components are more stable. Second, upbringing only forms a part of human capital. Beside cognitive skills, human capital also includes social capital and creative capital, which are the real key players in post-industrial economies. If the upbringing component of the national education system is lost, it may degrade the quality of human capital required at the next stage of national economic development. Third, Russian upbringing practices are based on a significant experience of global importance; a lot of funds have been invested to organizational and financial structure of upbringing throughout many decades. To modernize upbringing, we should tie it closely to economic and social development needs of the country. Governmental or nonprofit grants could be provided to fund a number of projects to be implemented by regional teacher associations. The Creative Leader program, for example, consists in creating reliable instruments to measure creative and cooperation skills, developing reasonable standards to determine what creative and cooperation skills children must have and use at each age, reconciling these standards with those of general education, introducing a competitive program to create specific forms of working designed exclusively for contemporary children, and discarding without mercy everything that worked with previous generations only.DOI: 10.17323/1814-9545-2014-2-278-298