(2026) Science and education, 1, 109-120. Odessa.
Mykola-Oleg Yershov,
PhD in Educational / Pedagogical Sciences,
Director of Ukrainian Center for Dual Education LLC,
17, Mala Berdychivska Str., Zhytomyr, Ukraine
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6839-622X
INTERDEPENDENCE OF SOCIAL AND HUMANITIES EDUCATION AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN CONTEMPORARY SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE
SUMMARY:
In conditions of geopolitical instability, there is a growing need to develop worldview competencies in young people, which are the foundation for the effective realization of academic freedom and responsible personal choice. However, an analysis of the results of a survey of graduates and students (2025) reveals a systemic gap between declarative goals and practice: more than 37% of respondents did not have a real choice of disciplines and 58% are dissatisfied with the quality of social and humanitarian education due to its formalism. The need to overcome this imitation model and strengthen the role of social sciences and humanities in the training of subject-oriented, critically thinking specialists determines the relevance of this study. The purpose of the article is to identify and characterize the relationship between social and humanitarian education and academic freedom. To this end, a number of methods were used: information search analysis of publications from well-known scientometric databases – to study the state of research on the problem; content analysis – for systematic processing of information and identification of the frequency of use of key concepts; contextual analysis – to study academic freedom in inseparable connection with specific sociocultural, political, and historical circumstances that determine the transformation of the content of social and humanitarian education; philosophical and social analysis of source materials to study the phenomena of “academic freedom” and “social and humanities education” through the prism of philosophical questions about the nature, development, values, and laws of society; comparison and generalization for comparing foreign and domestic discourses; analysis of contemporary monitoring studies, analytical reports, and the results of the author's online survey of graduates and applicants to Ukrainian higher education institutions – to assess the state of academic freedom and social and humanitarian education in domestic educational institutions. The application of these methods yielded the following results: publications obtained as a result of monitoring scientific databases NRAT, Google Scholar, and Taylor & Francis were analyzed; educational programs of various levels were analyzed for the presence of a social and humanitarian component; a survey of graduates and higher education applicants was conducted to identify their attitudes towards academic freedom and the quality of socio-humanitarian training of students for life; an algorithm for monitoring the humanisation of educational programmes and a checklist for experts were developed. A summary of the results allows us to draw the following conclusions: the marginalization of social and humanitarian education and the decline in academic freedom are interdependent processes that form a single dynamic system; high-quality humanities education creates an environment for the realization of freedom of choice, while academic autonomy is a necessary condition for the development of the content and ethics of education itself; the balance of these elements affects the intellectual stability of society and its ability to engage in critical self-reflection in the context of military challenges. Educational institutions are offered tools for independent assessment of their educational programs in terms of the actual provision of academic freedom and improving the quality of socio-humanitarian training of future specialists..
KEYWORDS:
higher education, social and humanitarian education, freedom of choice, academic freedom, academic autonomy, educational program
FULL TEXT:
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