The Ontological Foundations of the Transformation of Education: from Substantiality to Processualism

Abstract

The article provides a philosophical and anthropological analysis of the ontological foundations of the transformation of education. The crisis of modern education is interpreted not as institutional or methodological inefficiency, but as a consequence of the dominance of the substantial educational paradigm, rooted in the classical metaphysics of stable entities and implemented through the paradigm of knowledge possession (“to have”). The authors introduce and substantiate the conceptual opposition “substantial education – processual education”. The substantial model reduces learning to the translation of ready-made knowledge, forms monologue thinking, atomization of personality and loss of semantic foundations. As a constructive alternative, the concept of processual education is proposed, based on the hermeneutics of dialogue (H.-G. Gadamer), the anthropological opposition “to have – to be” (E. Fromm) and the existential principle “existence precedes essence” (J.-P. Sartre). Processual education is understood as a dialogical space of being and self-projection of the subject, initiated by the student’s questioning. The key criterion for the effectiveness of education in this model is the degree of depth of appropriation and creative transformation of knowledge