Education of a human life space: adaptation, self-regulation, self-organization

New terms that appeared in education such as self-development, self-design, self-education, self-realization, creativity etc. allowed to extend the understanding of world space of a human being considerably a self-organizing system. In this respect, such terms as “opportunities extension”, “personal potential actualization”, and ”self-evolution” combining the history of human development, its present and future are considered as synonyms to education. That is why the term “education” implies the continuity of the process, establishment of various human manifestations in the life activity or a human being on the whole. V.E. Klochko gives a new meaning to the category and defines education as “a consistent on-going sovereignization process concurrent with the establishment of a multi-dimensional world of a human being with a complete set of value-sense coordinates providing for the active and selective sovereign behaviour” [9; 6-7].

All opinions existing in psychology at present regarding education of a human being as a problem of psychological systems self-organization can be divided into three groups in the course of analysis.

The first group includes psychological theories of the so-called adaptive type. Despite the fact that the representatives of this group define a human being as a self-organizing system, they constrict its development to adaptation or conformity to the external environment. Human self-evolution is connected with the improvement of psychological mechanisms of life activity regulation and is consciously grounded on individual abilities of a human being to adopt to changing environmental conditions during regulation process, on personal qualities guiding one's social behavior and on the ability to assign universal human values, social standards and attitudes that “organize human life” [8].

Understanding of psychic adaptation as an adaptation process is aimed at protection of body and psychics of a human being from destructive environmental impacts. The social and psychological adaptation is a constant process of a person's active adaptation to existing environmental conditions as well as the result of this process. Although social adaptation is a constantly-going process, this term however is often connected with the period of significant changes in the person's activity or environment.

Another important aspect of social adaptation is taking a certain social role by a person. Due to this, social adaptation is referred to as one of the main social and psychological mechanisms of personal socialization. The success of adaptation depends very much upon the adequate self-perception and understanding of one's social connections by the person: distorted or underdeveloped opinion about oneself results in various adaptation problems.

The problem of social and psychological adaptation also covers such terms as “adaptiveness” and “unadaptiveness” that are characterized by achievement or non-achievement of the set aims in the process of life activity correspondingly.

Main types of a person's adaptation process are formed depending upon the structure of the person's needs and motives and are as follows:

1) active type is characterized by mainly active influence on social environment;

2) passive type is characterized by passive conforming acceptance of aims and value orientation of the group.

Psychological theories belonging to the first group pay attention to the stability as a characteristic of personality. Numerous studies of this type are devoted to stress resistance, emotional stability, tolerance as conflicts resistance etc. as characteristic features of a personality. The supporters of this opinion point out that a personality can resist negative influence and perform reasonable constructive changes in the environment due to psychological stability, thus, providing for the efficiency of life and activity, development and improvement of a personality as well as preservation of psychic health.

Self-organizing origin of theories belonging to this group is connected with the systemic organization of psychic adaptation and its role in the conscious activity of a person. The process of psychic adaptation itself implies not only the influence of the subject on the environment but the influence of the environment on the subject. The psychic adaptation as a process of optimal conformity of a personality and the environment achieved in the course of activity gives a person an opportunity to satisfy urgent needs. Adaptation opportunities of a person are conditioned by a complicated multi-level structural and functional system with mostly psychological or psychological mechanisms prevailing at each regulation level.

Scientists define the following levels of psychic adaptation: social and psychological; psychological (characteristic features of a personality, activities, and psychic states); psycho-physiological (integration of cerebral systems); peripheral (vegetative and humoral mechanisms). With account to numerous levels of psychic adaptation, it is considered to be an integral characteristic of a personality characterizing its stability and capability to resist break-downs in psychic adaptation.

Thus, a self-organizing origin of psychological systems is considered by the representatives of the first group to be connected with the system's ability to adapt to environmental conditions which guarantees the system's stability at all its levels under changing external conditions. Education of a human being in the context of the research held by this group of researches is a developing process of person’s adaptation to constantly changing environmental condition at all levels of psychological system organization. Here one may speak about unilateral “adaptation” of a person: adaptation of internal to external which determines if a person’s life activity is a success, that is why education here means “adaptation” and “conformity”.

The second group includes psychological theories considering self-evolution and self—organization of a human being as a process happening due to innovations that are “at the same time conditional and conditioning” for human development [16]. The representatives of this group believe that innovations are formed on the basis of a number of personal characteristics such as ability to keep and preserve all positive moments in one's history, accumulate the results of development, keep up to date one’s potential mental content, create something new in the world and extending the sphere of the potential [18].

V.G. Budanov points out that ideas developed in A.I. Bogdanov's tectology, L. von Bertalaffy’s systems theory, N. Viner’s cybernetics allowed to form a general idea about systems and their configuration, mechanisms for systems’ integrity maintenance and homeostasis and ways of self-organizing systems management [4; 7]. In this respect, the key concept of the theories belonging to this group is “self-regulation” representing the ability to be a subject of one's own conscious activity and the process of realization of this ability [12; 13].

In the case of self-regulation the system functions in the following way: regulation effect is formed by collaboration of all system's components and due to this requires no constant control, thus being more reasonable as far as resources are concerned. Researches sharing this approach define self-regulation as a systematic process including dynamic actions of a person (here these theories are superior to the theories of the first group) aimed at adaptation to constantly changing environmental conditions. The scientist underlines the cyclical pattern of this process.

Ideas about self-regulation developed in the laboratory for self-regulation of Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education are characterized by its complexity regarding the internal structure of the defined self-regulation components due to the original personal orientation of the studies. Thus, for example in the planning phase up to 6 functions are defined (target setting, strategy determination, determination of effectiveness, subjective value, expectation and process-orientation). At present the researches' focus is transferred from general issues of self-regulation structure to development of its cognitive and personal aspects, to understanding the fact that various personal and cognitive structures are backed by specific structures of individual subjective activity organization.

At the same time Russian studies differ from Western psychology in a way that the former develop from general theory of structure and functions of conscious self-regulation to the study of personality and individual manifestations and forms of regulation, whereas western theories start from study of personality and separate sides of regulation and moves to an integral self-regulation theory and understanding the fact that regulation consciousness is a very important personal dimension.

Despite certain differences in approaches to the study of human self-regulation phenomenon, all scientific works demonstrate a common view of regulation as a most general function of psychic activity specific for a human-being allowing a person to act as a creator, executor, supervisor and judge of one's own activity, deeds, and life in general. Self-regulation is an embodiment of a general human ability to be a subject of one's conscious activity reflecting the abilities of his psychics and realized in a numerous variety of acts providing for the actual relations of the subject with various phenomena and manifestations of reality. Self-regulation is represented by two meanings: as a general ability for organization of activity of a human being acting as a subject of one's own activity and as a process of realization of the abovementioned ability in separate types of activity, behaviour and communication. However, Russian scientists point out that the ability of self-regulation is becoming a general ability only upon completion of formation of an integral conscious self-regulation system, formation of its conscious control and its introduction to the internal plan of actions.

The subjectness of a person is being developed and is becoming more sufficient in the process of further improvement of the self-regulation system, thus giving ground to certain personal innovations: confidence, self-sufficiency, responsibility, and initiative in all spheres of personal self-determination.

Therefore, according to the second group representatives’ opinion, the self-regulation is one of the innovations considered in the framework of the “human being” psychological system, “regulating” both his relations with the world and formation of other manifestations of self- (self-cognition, self-determination, self-evolution, self-realization, self-actualization and etc.) that make grounds for reality formation “where everything is progress and nothing is beyond progress” [6; 171]. Self-organization of the psychological system is grounded on the basis of the human being’s movement while performing individual vital activities at different levels aiming to accumulate innovations, of which psychic self-regulation is central. Within the context, education is “acquiring” oneself in the process of life (own abilities and potential for development) which occurs in the acts of interaction between “inner” and “external” resulting in innovations required for further development of psychological system.

However, the strategic factor for education of a human being in its complete sense can be the human being itself, and this is the opinion completely shared by representatives of the third group of psychological theories, according to which the self-organizing system is understood as the system that maintains its tolerance due to interaction with the environment and is able to transform its both its organization and processes within the system independently under impact of the environment. The conditions for the development of self-organizing systems as well as basic regularities and such mechanisms as differentiation, integration, hierarchization of elements, self oscillations and feedbacks are provided by the action of the strategic factor. The representatives of this group believe that emerging of any self-organizing system, i.e. cluster of elements is caused by one and only reason: acquiring higher tolerance by these elements. The reason and, therefore, the objective of the elements cluster is the strategic factor (according to the authors of these theories and within the context defined by us it is a human being) due to which there emerges the unity for higher tolerance of its component parts. The developed unity, the system, can perform its main function subject to reaching the identity with the elements that formed it and that represent the self-organizing systems of a smaller size. This provides for evolutionary systems development that is posted as the ontological basis for synergetics and revealing the essence of the total philosophical principle “everything is in everything” that was developed due to works of P.T. de Chardin and others. Maintaining the attitude that “a human being came into existence and historically grows up from the whole material and the whole life” [5; 498] P.T. de Chardin proves in his work “Christ in Evolution” that the evolution has an irreversible nature saying that the life has a certain logics from the moment of its germ and up to the present: initially setting the requirement to all living beings to survive by lucky chance or by any other way, and then gradually comes to setting the requirement to improve the world and then oneself. According to the scientist, this is the logics that stipulated for the ways of life action. Out of these one can name abundance that is reached by way of masses effect; inventiveness that defines world freedom due to its variability; indifference expressing itself in the contradiction “between the element that emerged out of the multitude and the multitude that continuously emerges out of the element in the evolutionary process”. In this respect, the sufficient characteristic of the evolutionarity is the simultaneous and uniform nature of the Universe “drifting” in the direction of supercomplexity, super-focus and super- consciousness due to which the “human being phenomenon gains the specific and related sense” [5].

Expressing agreement with this characteristic (movement of the system in the direction of complication) we emphasize that in the framework of the evolution our position is close to H. Bergson’s considerations that “evolutionary movement was something simple and we could easily define its direction if the life would have the one single trajectory like that of a cannonball fires of a cannon. But here we deal with a shell, which burst into fragments the moment it was fired off; and these fragments being, as it were, themselves shells in their turn burst into other fragments, themselves in their turn destined to burst, and so on throughout the whole process. We perceive only that is closer to us – disperse movements of burst fragments. Starting from them we will have to gradually come to the initial movement. When the shell bursts its crushing is explained by both explosive power of powder it is filled with and metal resistance. The same could be said about the life fragmentation into individuals and species. This fragmentation in our opinion is due to the following two reasons: resistance experienced by life from the part of non-organized material and explosive force that the life bears in itself and that is caused by unstable balance of the tendencies” [17]. In this part we employ a big quotation since a metaphorical comparison of evolutionarity with the effect of the burst shell is most accurately reflecting the unevenness of the system movement. “Chaos is lying in the basis of mechanism of considerably simple structures merged into complex ones and mechanism of correlating their evolutions tempos” [10]. In this respect the chaos acts as a method for organization complications and a method for harmonization of development tempos for different fragments within a complex structure providing nonlinear nature of the systems development.

V.G. Budanov contributing to this opinion writes that “within the processes of self-regulation there is a qualitative compression of information as a result of quickly flowing process of natural self-selection that is difficult to trace; the product of these process being the order parameter able to be observed” [4; 40], this opinion is correlated with H. Bergson’s opinion that if it is required for the new specimen occurrence that the change would reach a certain value and commonness then it is imperceptibly and continuously committed in any living being in any moment.

Within the context of the third group theories, the subsystems are interrelated and interdependent; therefore, the peculiarities of the structure as well as the quality of organization of one of the subsystems can depend on the structure and quality of the organization of the other. The transition of quality features from one subsystem to the other depends on the peculiarities of organization of the system correlations and to be more particular, the quality features of these subsystems. In this respect E. Laslo remarked that “some systems are always requiring the medium of a particular type; it must be a medium consisting flows where the rich and continuous energy source is expanding the system” [13]. This point of view in its essence complies with the opinion expressed by A.G. Asmolov who pointed out that qualities of a human being that characterize one as the system element “open” only in the conditions of interactions within these or those systems [1]. In this respect, Ye.A. Semenova (2007) considers that the main strategic factor of a human being development is the human being itself, while the mechanisms of self-development in the authors opinion can be self-planning, self-regulation and self-organization [17].

Special emphasis shall be laid to psychological theories in the third group since these employ the heterostasis principle alongside with the self-regulation principle [11]. The question is the highest level of systematic organization of a human being – “development going beyond the standards through the standard-setting” [11; 54-55]. The representatives of this group point at the universal feature of self-organizing systems of any nature, i.e. self-determining that allows readdressing the responsibility for the choice from the external causation or necessity to a human being itself. This feature of a human being as a self-organizing system allows to consider the latter as the one able to “set oneself at the “limit” … that symbolizes for him the readiness to part with oneself as one had been before the “event”, i.e. to change oneself” [15; 353] acting not as a simple chain in the evolution but as the one responsible for the evolution.

Thus, having defined a human being as a self-organizing system we can detach the process of the system’s production and generation of the new that is immediately implemented into further determination of the system self-organization as a form where its development is performed. Thus, V.Ye. Klochko indicates that through the acts of such generation (the system’s generating the new) the self-organized system obtains the possibility to influence itself. According to him, this is “the principle of the system determination without which it is not possible to explain the mechanisms of the system self-organization and self-development as a form where self-organization is revealed” [10; 4].

We pay attention to the fact that the education of a human being as a self-organization is possible in the space defined by the unity of the world and the human being itself since “beyond us the world is mutual propensity without succession, we have succession inside us without external sets-string”, and only the unity of these beginnings makes “the process of organization and interpenetration” [2].

Within the context, the education of a human being can be considered as the problem of self-organization of one’s living space (according to M.K. Mamardashvili, without a human being “the world shall lack order, truth and beauty”), since the life of a human being itself is like a trajectory of movement of the self-organizing system within the time and space.

The understanding of the self-organization as the regulating bears a specific conceptual loading in respect to the human being education revealing through the possibility of the system for the self-generation, self-development, preserving its organization subject to changing internal and external conditions that are interacting with each other and providing the transition of the systems from one stationary state to the other with decrease in entropy, and, therefore, increase in the level of their organization.

We believe that the third group of the research has a direct access to research of the human being education that is understood as the expansion of the possibilities since it considers problems of emerging, existing, transformation, development and self-development of a human being in their unity. In the framework of these research, there is a possibility to consider the issues of individual educational strategies defining the direction vector and content of a human being education that are in their turn are defining in respect to the selected strategy for the living potential realization [7; 248]. In the process of life targets realization that seemed ended, we reveal their “transition”, “temporary” nature that reveals the prospects of movement to the next objective.

As such, to understand the education of a human being as the product of the human being oneself, his life, means the possibility to understand the human being itself – the most mysterious object in the world. In its turn, acknowledging the living subjectivity as the “specific single universal”, the living existence of reality and the notion “life” fills the life activity of a human being with real cultural and historical content. This is why in each single deed, action, act of vital activity and life creation a human being “feels oneself a part of this powerful life impulse” [3; 305], personifying in the process of life the creativity, endless development, unperceivable variety that is the infinite number of freedom degrees that defines unlimited possibilities of a human being [14]. In the coincident point of the human being possibility and reality conditions the “successful life” of a human being starts its development as a guarantee of achieving the objective in performing each separate action. This is why the objective’s achieving gives the human being the largest subjective satisfaction giving ground to success in life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. A.G. Asmolov, “Historical and evolutionary approach to understanding the personality: problems and prospects», Psychological issues, Moscow, 1986, №1.

2. L. Von Bartalanffy, “History and Status of General System Theory”, System research. Annuary, Moscow, Nauka, 1973, pp. 20-37.

3. I.I. Blauberg Henri Bergson, Moscow, Progress-Traditsiya, 2003.

4. V.G. Budanov, “Model for the evolution of disciplinary knowledge as the process of interdisciplinary correlation”, Materials of Moscow International Synergetic Forum. – Moscow, Institute of Physiology in Russian Academy of Sciences, 1997.

5. P.T. de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (Le Phenomene humain), Moscow, AST Publishing House, limited liability company, 2002, pp.495-510.

6. I.V. Chernikova, Postneoclassical science and philosophy of the process, Tomsk, Scientific and Technological Laboratory Publishing House, 2007, pp.252.

7. E.L. Deci, R.M. Ryan, «The “What” and “Why” of goal pursuits: human needs and the self-determination of behavior», Psychological Inquiry, 2000, Vol. 11, 4, pp.227-268.

8. I.V. Kiyatkina, “Axiological and conceptual organization of the life project”, [Electronic source] www.pirao.ru/ru/news

9. V.E. Klochko, “Ontopedagogics: psychological grounds and humanitarian potential”, Problems of objectives definition in psychological and pedagogical research: Materials of the second Zabaykalye interregional School of young scientists. Chita, Zabaykalye State Pedagogical University Publishing house, 2003, pp.6-7.

10. V.Ye. Klochko, “Human being as the self-organizing psychological system” Human being as the self-organizing psychological system: Materials of regional conference, Barnaul, Barnaul State Pedagogical University Publishing House, 2000, pp. 3-7.