Factual and experiential understanding as the goals of the 21st century education

Abstract

The author draws our attention to the importance and complexity of developing learners' understanding as the goal of education. Her starting point is the proposal of distinguishing two types of understanding, arising from different paradigms and highlighting different aspects of this process. She distinguishes factual understanding, which is the focus of traditional pedagogy embedded in the positivist paradigm, which comes down to the mental process of updating knowledge about objective reality, and experiential understanding, the importance of which is recognized by humanistic pedagogy, which assumes that the world available to a man is a reality of values and meanings, and the process of understanding should be considered as a feature of the human way of being, consisting in their constant interpretation. In the context of this duality of meanings of understanding, she considers the presence of factual and experiential understanding in the teleological pedagogical discourse - creating goals for the 21st century education. For this purpose, she reflects on leading international educational reports and documents regarding the education system in Poland (educational reports and provisions of legal acts), as well as recalls the classic taxonomy of goals, which is a model for practitioners in formulating educational goals. The analyzes lead to the conclusion that while at the level of setting the final goals, the importance of education in understanding the world in the sense of experiential understanding is indicated, this perspective changes at the level of intermediate and specific goals, where understanding has only material connotations.