Review article
https://doi.org/10.21464/mo42.222.95115
Humanistic Education as the End Goal of Human Survival
Darija Rupčić
orcid.org/0000-0003-2235-1410
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University Osijek, Croatia
Abstract
The goal of this work is to emphasise the importance of the humanistic ideal of education as perceived by a pleiad of great 18th and 19th century thinkers and philosophers. It seems that the enlightenment’s founding values and its dream of the comprehensively self-educated and emancipated individual is slowly dying in our ‘knowledge society’. By reducing education to training, it becomes something foreign and exterior to the human spirit. Academic communities throughout Europe and the world are experiencing a strong shift away from and renunciation of the foundational humanistic ideas of education. Much of what is propagated and proclaimed as part of the syntagm of the ‘knowledge society’ seems to be rhetoric. Numerous education reforms have led and lead towards the economisation and commodification of education, distorting and betraying the founding humanistic values and ideals and making the role of the critical subject nearly impossible. If the basic tasks of the university are the search for and transmission of the truth, then they are impossible if their final goal is not the education of the whole person, which are the constitutive factors humanness and humanity. Using numerous sources related to this subject, and primarily their stated ideas on education, this paper is expected to contribute to the possibility of the rediscovery and reevaluation of humanistic and enlightenment ideas of education.
Keywords
education (Bildung); knowledge; idea of the university; humanistic education; neoliberal capitalism
Hrčak ID:
158555
URI
Publication date:
26.4.2016.
Visits: 3.709 *