Geopolitical Aspect in the Studies of Education Environment

Abstract

The present article is dedicated to the brief analysis of interdependence between the geopolitical and education media in the modern world. It studies such geopolitical and educational concepts as globalization and internationalization, “Americanization” and “Europeanization”; analyses the role of mentality as a geopolitical and educational construct. It substantiates the urgency of education as one of the principal tools for forming a new geopolitical model of the world. It arrives at the conclusion that geopolitical relationships between states are mainly determined and regulated by the level of their national education systems’ development. The social-philosophic analysis of functioning and reformation of the education sphere under modern geopolitical conditions demonstrated that “such concepts as “education” and “globalization” are often ambiguously interpreted. The process of education activity globalization is evaluated in a similar ambiguous way. Understanding and adequate evaluation of the current processes and phenomena depend on the temporal and culture-philosophical context. Bearing great significance in both geopolitical and educational aspect, the concept of Europeanization deserves special attention. “In the universal development process Europeanization, on one hand, is a part of globalization (especially in the sphere of education) and a mini project of Europe as a miniature world model with unified standards, requirements, common governmental units etc. On the other hand, Europeanization is a process of separation and union of certain states to spite the rest of the world, of spreading European values and traditions, of integrating of their projects into the universal space in order to increase their status, power, scale, and self-perfection as a world unit”. Therefore, “Americanization” and “Europeanization” of education activities act as alternative models of globalizations competing one with another in the general system of occurring geopolitical and educational processes. Another fact to be considered is that the mental cultural and historical predisposition of certain societies is seen as a more or less stable characteristic, determining the core of all their internal metamorphoses and development, thereby allowing some forecasting of educational systems’ behaviour (though approximately) in the currently established geopolitical conditions, whether they can follow the way of the suggested reforms or they select their own path. The inefficiency of copying reforms successful in some societies is frequently determined by the fact that their ideologists do not account for the mentality of the community the reforms are imposed on, the community taking reforms as something alien, standing beyond its customary world model. Historical determination of mentality manifests itself in the fact that mentality cannot be forced up on a nation as it often happens in the period of reforms, but, as we have mentioned above, it is formed naturally, developed with a historically determined unity of natural, geographic, ethnical, geopolitical