Let us formulate the most general and fundamental conclusion from what has been said: a personality is not so much what a person knows and what he is trained as his attitude to the world, to people, to himself, the sum of desires and goals. For this reason alone, the task of promoting the formation of personality cannot be solved in the same way as the task of teaching (official pedagogy has always sinned with this). We need a different path. See. For a summary of the personality-semantic level of personality, let us turn to the concept of personality orientation. In the dictionary «Psychology» (1990) we read: «Personality is characterized by an orientation — a steadily dominant system of motives — interests, beliefs, ideals, tastes, etc., in which human needs manifest themselves: deep semantic structures («dynamic semantic systems», according to L.S. Vygotsky), which determine her consciousness and behavior, are relatively resistant to verbal influences and are transformed in the joint activity of groups (the principle of activity mediation), the degree of awareness of their relationship to reality: attitudes (according to V.N. Myasishchev), attitudes ( according to D.N. Uznadze and others), dispositions (according to V.A. Yadov). A developed personality has a developed self-consciousness…” It follows from this definition that:
- the basis of the personality, its personal-semantic content is relatively stable and really determines the consciousness and behavior of a person;
- the main channel of influence on this content, i.e. education itself is, first of all, the participation of the individual in the joint activities of the group, while verbal forms of influence are in principle ineffective;
- one of the properties of a developed personality is an understanding, at least in basic terms, of one’s personal and semantic content. An undeveloped person either does not know his own «I», or does not think about it.
In paragraph 1, in essence, we are talking about the identified L.I. Bozhovich internal positioning, characteristic of the individual in relation to the social environment and individual objects of the social environment. G.M. Andreeva points to the legitimacy of identifying the concept of personality orientation with the concept of predisposition, which is equivalent to a social attitude. Noting the connection of these concepts with the idea of personal meaning A.N. Leontiev and the works of A.G. Asmolov and M.A. Kovalchuk, dedicated to the social attitude as a personal meaning, G.M. Andreeva writes: “Such a formulation of the problem does not exclude the concept of a social attitude from the mainstream of general psychology, as well as the concepts of “attitude” and “orientation of the personality”. On the contrary, all the ideas considered here affirm the right to exist for the concept of “social attitude” in general psychology, where it now coexists with the concept of “attitude” in the sense in which it was developed in the school of D.N. Uznadze” (Andreeva G.M. Social psychology. M., 1998. P. 290).
To sum up what has been said, the term upbringing concerns, first of all, the formation of personal-semantic content associated with the formation of life goals, value orientations, likes and dislikes. Thus, education obviously differs from training, which is based on the impact in the field of individual performance content of the individual. Education without relying on the goals formed by education is ineffective. If coercion, rivalry, and verbal suggestion are acceptable for the purposes of education in some situations, then other mechanisms are involved in the process of education. You can force a child to learn the multiplication table, but you cannot force him to love math. You can force them to sit quietly in class, but to force them to be kind is unrealistic. To achieve these goals, a different way of influence is needed: the inclusion of a young person (a child, a teenager, a young man, a girl) in the joint activities of a peer group of peers led by a teacher-educator. It is important to remember: not all employment is activity. Employment can also occur at the level of forced action. In this case, the motive of the activity does not coincide with its subject, as in the proverb: «at least beat the stump, just to spend the day.» Consider, for example, a group of students cleaning the school yard. This action is not necessarily an «activity». It will be it if the guys want to put the yard in order, if they gathered voluntarily and planned their action, distributed responsibilities, organized work and thought out a control system. In this case, the motive of the activity — the desire to put the yard in order — is the ultimate goal of the activity, and all actions (planning, organization) acquire a personal meaning (I want and, therefore, I do). Not every group is capable of activity, but only one where relations of friendship and cooperation exist at least minimally.
The second example: schoolchildren were summoned to the director and, under fear of big troubles, were ordered to clean the yard. This is the action level. Each of its elements is done under duress, devoid of personal meaning. The guys are forced to take the tool and pretend rather than work. Schoolchildren are interested in performing the least number of operations, but at the same time they want to avoid punishment. In the first example, each of the participants in the activity remains satisfied with good work — this is how another brick is laid in the foundation of a person who willingly takes part in useful work. The second case does not bring any results, except, perhaps, a badly cleaned yard. The schoolchildren forgot about their participation before, having abandoned shovels, rakes and whisks, they ran home.
We believe that the development of a teenager’s personality under the influence of collective activity includes the following stages.
- Formation of a positive attitude towards the act of pro-social activity as a desirable action and anticipation of one’s own positive emotions about this, reinforced by the group attitude and the position of the emotional leader — leader (teacher).
- Formation of a semantic attitude and personal meaning on the basis of this attitude (self-affirmation by positive actions and potential readiness for them as a means of self-affirmation).
- The formation of the motive of socially useful activity as a meaning-forming one, promoting self-affirmation, meeting the age-related need for socially relevant activities, acting as a means of forming self-respect through the respect of others.
- The formation of a semantic disposition — the first over-activity semantic structure that has transsituational properties, i.e. the ability to selflessly care for people (personal quality), based on a general positive attitude towards them (humanity). This, in essence, is the life position — the orientation of the individual.
- Formation of a semantic construct. In our understanding, this is the awareness of one’s life position among other life positions.
- “It is a concept that an individual uses to categorize events and chart a course of action. (…) A person experiences events, interprets them, structures and endows them with meanings”19. (19 First L., John O. Psychology of Personality. M., 2000. P. 384). From the construction of a semantic construct, in our opinion, a person’s understanding of himself as a person begins. Most often this occurs in older adolescence with the transition to adolescence.
- The derivative of this process is the formation of personal values as the basis for developing the principles of behavior and relationships inherent in the individual. They are reflected in the consciousness of the subject in the form of value orientations, on the basis of which a person chooses his life goals and means leading to their achievement. This category also includes the idea of the meaning of life. The process of formation of life positions and value orientations of the individual is characterized by us on the basis of the model proposed by D.A. Leontiev (Fig. 1). Commenting on it, he writes: “As it follows from the scheme, empirically recorded influences on consciousness and activity have only personal meanings and semantic attitudes of a particular activity, which are generated both by the motive of this activity and by stable semantic constructs and dispositions of the personality. Motives, semantic constructs and dispositions form the second hierarchical level of semantic regulation. The highest level of semantic regulation is formed by values that act as meaning-forming in relation to all other structures ”(Leontiev D.A. Three facets of meaning // Traditions and prospects of the activity approach in psychology. School of A.N. Leontiev. M., 1999. P. 314 -315).
It would be quite logical to conclude that in the process of personality ontogenesis, the ascending formation of semantic structures primarily occurs, starting with the attitude to social objects, then — the formation of semantic attitudes (the pre-motive of activity) and its personal meaning. Further, at the second hierarchical level, the formation of motives, semantic dispositions and constructs with over-activity, personal properties is possible. Only on this basis is it possible to form value orientations. A mature personality is capable of a downward path of behavior formation: from values to constructs and dispositions, from them to sense-forming motives, then to semantic attitudes, the personal meaning of a particular activity and related relationships.
In connection with the foregoing, we note: the elders, one way or another in contact with the younger ones, need to understand that the formation of a personality begins with its perception of the relationship of significant others. In the future, these relationships are refracted into a willingness to act accordingly: into a social attitude in its semantic version (pre-motive), and then into a sense of the personal meaning of the upcoming activity, which ultimately gives rise to its motives. We have already spoken about the influence of motive on personality. But it should be emphasized once again that everything begins with human relationships from those who are significant — to those who need these relationships.
Unfortunately, it is far from accidental that in the majority of secondary schools, study does not become a personality-forming activity for schoolchildren. This happens for two reasons. Firstly, school education is traditionally built as a compulsory occupation, and its meaning is not obvious to many children. Secondly, the organization of education in a modern mass general education school does not take into account the psychological characteristics of school-age children. The same applies to juniors, teenagers, and high school students. Even a first-grader, due to this traditional character, loses interest after the first months, and sometimes even weeks of classes, and begins to perceive study as a boring necessity. Below we will return to this problem, and now we note that in modern conditions, with the traditional organization of the educational process, study does not represent a psychological support for the educational process, therefore, in order to form a personality, it becomes necessary to organize other activities.
What are these goals?
Following the logic of this work, it is necessary to rely not on specific personality traits and not even on the relationships that it should develop “ideally”, but on a few, but decisive semantic orientations and correlations of motives, and everything else a person, based on these orientations, will develop myself. In other words, it is about the orientation of the individual.