SCIENCE IN A MARKET ENVIRONMENT

НАУКА В УСЛОВИЯХ РЫНКА

Баташов Сергей Олегович

студент, кафедра социологии и организации работы с молодёжью, Белгородский государственный университет,

РФ, г. Белгород

Данилов Александр Николаевич

научный руководитель, д-р социол. наук, проф., член-корр. НАН Беларуси, Белорусский государственный университет,

Беларусь, г. Минск

ABSTRACT

The article analyzes the transformation of the higher education system and science in the context of a market economy and technological progress. It examines the consequences of the Bologna Process for post-Soviet countries, as well as the impact of market trends on educational programs, which are increasingly focused on short-term courses and practical applicability of knowledge at the expense of fundamental principles. The author raises questions about the contradictions between traditional and innovative approaches to education, the role of the state and business in shaping educational standards, and the challenges of monetizing scientific activities. Special attention is paid to the prospects for the development of science in the era of digitalization and artificial intelligence, as well as the need to maintain a balance between fundamental knowledge and market demands.

АННОТАЦИЯ

Статья посвящена анализу трансформации системы высшего образования и науки в условиях рыночной экономики и технологического прогресса. Рассматриваются последствия Болонского процесса для постсоветских стран, а также влияние рыночных тенденций на образовательные программы, которые всё чаще ориентируются на краткосрочные курсы и практическую применимость знаний в ущерб фундаментальности. Автор поднимает вопросы о противоречиях между традиционными и инновационными подходами к образованию, роли государства и бизнеса в формировании образовательных стандартов, а также о проблемах монетизации научной деятельности. Особое внимание уделено перспективам развития науки в эпоху цифровизации и искусственного интеллекта, а также необходимости сохранения баланса между фундаментальными знаниями и требованиями рынка.

Keywords: higher education, Bologna Process, market economy, fundamental science, innovations, educational reforms, monetization of science, digitalization, artificial intelligence, post-Soviet space, universality of education, scientific and technological progress.

Ключевые слова: высшее образование, Болонский процесс, рыночная экономика, фундаментальная наука, инновации, образовательные реформы, монетизация науки, цифровизация, искусственный интеллект, постсоветское пространство, универсальность образования, научно-технический прогресс.

Science is the engine of progress not only of technical, but also of social and humanitarian knowledge, culture, ethics and morality, promoting new views, theories and meanings. Throughout the existence of mankind, science has fulfilled a number of applied functions that have ensured the advancement of various spheres of life in new forms. However, on the line of time man repeatedly faced cataclysms of technogenic and social character, which quite differently influenced the outcome of the needs in one or another system of scientific knowledge. At the turn of the two-thousand, at the signing of the Bologna Declaration on 19 July 1999 there was a turning point, which in many ways still has a direct impact on the quality of education of students in all countries of the post-Soviet space. The views on higher education and the preceding secondary education based on a single track with transitions in the form of USE in Russia or CT in Belarus differed, because in the intergenerational interaction there is the experience of both unified testing and the bygone entrance tests, which, by the way, remained at the subsequent levels of education in the transition to master's, postgraduate, residency and further. At the same time, not the least role in this system is played by the very purpose of education for the production of qualified scientific personnel to meet the need of the market in the reproduction of certain innovations.

The main question of the last decade, devoted to science, comes down to higher education and is not so much about its necessity as about its universality for the general qualification system. The market system of economic relations, which largely depends on the rhetoric of trends and varying demand for certain products and services, can provide human needs in new goods in a certain periodicity, and this periodicity directly depends on the ability of production to quickly rearrange production lines to produce goods of the required image and the level of training of the personnel themselves. Specialists with universal education are able not only to rebuild equipment, but also to get used to the changed type of workload, thus ensuring greater demand and, as a consequence, the success of any enterprise. New challenges in this market paradigm force educational institutions to change the structure of education itself, replacing long courses of fundamental knowledge for scientists with retraining by short webinars and accelerated courses, presenting information in a more concise form for easier assimilation and oriented to practical application in other spheres of labour. At the same time, accelerations of this kind lead to a strong simplification and the problem of unsystematised knowledge, and, as a consequence, to a departure from some depth of knowledge of the subject of study. It is worth defining this issue in detail from several points of view and identifying trends in the development of this paradigm, making a forecast for its further development in the conditions of emerging views.

It is necessary to highlight the fact that the process of acquiring knowledge in a certain field with the possibility of its subsequent application varies not only from the learner's abilities, but also from the learning programme itself, which most often has a certain system and levels of complexity, requiring diligence and consistency. Canadian communication theorist M. McLuhan noted that the development of electronic means of communication returns human thinking to the pre-textual era, and the linear sequence of signs ceases to be the basis of culture and understanding of information, and American philosopher, sociologist and futurologist, one of the authors of the concept of post-industrial society E. Toffler wrote that the acceleration of changes in modern society requires from a person a continuous break of thought links. In this regard, the concept of human perception itself changes the concept of science goals from a system into a commodity of quick demand, because, using non-linear principles of memorisation and the need to momentarily get rid of quickly outdated information, makes the sequence of its acquisition and consolidation unnecessary.

The need for universal qualification personnel, on the contrary, assumes that a specialist has in-depth knowledge in the field, and then the employer often directs the employee to obtain qualifications of the same short courses, but provided that the latter already has some basis (system). And when a student transitions from a student environment to a working environment (in many cases, this happens already in senior years), the student ceases to see value in education and science, realising that much of what he or she learns has no practical value. The society of manufacturers and large companies today has gone further, and in the conditions of market competition is gradually taking over part of the educational process to adjust to its needs, defining the future of the student in their master's programmes of privately established universities with the proceeds from the direct work of the organisation. Examples of such accredited universities are JA. Practicum, T-Bank University, School 24 from Sber and others.

Meanwhile, the market economy also affects the state apparatus of education and enlightenment management, as today there are proposals to reduce the duration of the school programme in Russia, and one year of study is envisaged in master's degree programmes in Belarus instead of two traditional ones. Nevertheless, by virtue of the goals of the state functioning as an institute of management of spheres of life of the society on strategic development and planning, the question is raised about counteraction to such accelerated programmes for preservation of potential and improvement of quality of fundamental bases of scientific knowledge for subsequent generations. The implementation of educational programmes in universities at the expense of the budget and targeted training presuppose interdependence on the system and course training of students, on the financial support of the universities themselves, on the employment of jobs and on the promotion of initiatives to create basic science through economic incentives. Legislative fixation of incentives, forms and methods of teaching, as well as the system of the training programme assume nominal bureaucratic compliance, but do not guarantee the output of qualified personnel of a scientific nature due to the previous thesis about the rapidly changing needs of the labour market and its dominance. The state policy in interaction with business and production gradually adjusts workers to the need for constant training and requalification so that labour remains liquid and highly qualified. In this case, by analogy with supply and demand in the market of goods and services, the demand for fundamental and systemic in relation to practical and fragmentary is conditionally divided as 30%/70%, based on the need for researchers at institutes of higher education, the number of allocated budget places at scientific levels of education to workers, teachers and engineers.

As far as science and research of large institutes are concerned, the crisis started far from today. Between 1985 and 1995, expenditures on R&D in comparable prices decreased, according to various calculations, almost 15 times. Allocations from the federal budget for fundamental research and promotion of scientific and technological progress (STP) fell from 13.44 trillion roubles in 1991 to 2.68 trillion roubles in 1995, or about 5 times Russia's total. Scientific activity as a sphere of labour activity is regarded by students as working off the budgetary education received, while being ignored as the main one. Especially great intellectual losses occurred in the process of serious political repressions and unilateral closed policy.

The main pillar of the conflict of opinions when deciding on the necessity of certain reforms in the scientific environment is the cultural and attitudinal aspect. The main pillar of the conflict of opinions in deciding whether or not to reform the scientific environment is the cultural and attitudinal aspect. The old formation advocates the preservation of the basics of scientific teaching, where traditional methods of fixed schedules, scientific plans, manual recording, lecture reading without the use of gamification and presentation material in a simplified form, and most importantly - fundamentalism, while the new formation, acting on the principle of innovation, strives for simplification, flexible time management and rationalisation of the process into an applied orientation, where the main thing is universality and accuracy. At the same time, the labour market gives greater assistance in the formation of attitudes to the second one as it benefits from it.

However, speaking about science, one cannot but talk about monetisation. Today, despite the presence of student journals, serious scientific editions offering free publications, paid publication is spreading and increasing in supply, which provides printing in rating editions for quite a considerable amount of money, thus exposing the filter of entry into the scientific environment from young and promising scientists on economic grounds. Moreover, the ranking on the rating of intellectual merit is done from journal to journal on the basis of the rating of the university itself, the number of citations, which can often be applied to low-qualified papers or with the assistance of the student's performance in the course of the teacher. There is also a place for fraudulent operations offering publications in fake conferences and journals, when the scientist himself gets into a situation of deception.

Speaking about the perspective of the scientific community and science in general, it is important to specify that popularisation of science as an activity is not advertised to the broad intellectual community, as self-presentation is not inherent to this sphere and is performed basically exclusively at the expense of open popular science literature and professors' work in mass media on current processes of various spheres of society. The prerequisites for this type of self-presentation of science are two factors: additional, often higher earnings and the promotion of science through itself alongside competing professors. Today, science is definitely still the engine of progress, with neural networks making a significant contribution in the near future, acting on the basis of interdisciplinary synthesis with great productive potential as a result. We should not forget about the fundamentality, which will turn a part of substantiated and proven research into axioms and history of science development, thus forming a layer from which future generations of intelligent systems will be based. At the same time, the question of changing the concept of teaching science works in conjunction with human physiology, which is not able to adapt to such rapid changes in the same period of time, and therefore the prospect is not so much a revolutionary change in the approach to science in the form of excerpts, but rather a symbiosis of the work of search technology, induction and deduction, fragmentation and synthesis with the personal talent, creativity and intelligence of the individual in correlation with the market demand for innovation.

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