WHAT IS HUMANISTIC EDUCATION STILL FOR?

Abstract

We belong to the era that has razed the importance of humanistic education to the ground. Before hundred years or so, young people were still proud to study philosophy in their own pursuit for education. It was said that they were directed toward noble sciences, disciplines that strengthen and refine the personality of man. Contemporary, mostly globalized world has, however, sucked all its phenomena into the vortex of economic dynamics and reification. Knowledge has become a commodity and the only education that is valued is the one that ravages trails of mind, that offers technical and operational knowledge. In such a constellation of education, all actors have changed roles, players and spoilsports have swapped places. If one of the actors of the education process argues that education should encourage thinking in man, they become renegades, because that place has been already filled by instrumental thinking focused on the problem. In a struggle against passive, reproductive knowledge, what has been also forgotten is thinking and asking about thinking itself, it has been forgotten to ask questions about humaneness of our existence – basically, it has been forgotten to ask questions. The very question: what is humanistic education still for? – has, therefore, a strong flavor of times long gone, it awakens archaic motives, but also gathers and keeps in itself concerns about the future of mankind.