Responsibility as an academic subject: philosophical foundations of a new didactics

Abstract

Background. In contemporary Russian education, social responsibility is normatively established as a personal outcome of teaching and upbringing. However, its ontological nature remains unclear: responsibility cannot be reduced to knowledge, skill, or competence. A contradiction arises between the pedagogical rhetoric of «forming responsibility» and the lack of philosophical justification for the very possibility and limits of its didactization.

Purpose. To substantiate the ontological irreducibility of responsibility as an event, to reveal the immanent paradoxes of its didactization, and to propose the conceptual foundations of an alternative didactic model in which responsibility acts not as a subject of study, but as a pervasive dimension of the educational process.

Materials and methods. The study draws upon philosophical texts by H. Jonas, I. De Gennaro, R. Luftner, and K. Jaspers, which provide the ontological and phenomenological framework for understanding responsibility. Sources also include normative documents (Federal State Educational Standards), pedagogical research, and foreign works on citizenship education. The methodological toolkit comprises the phenomenological method (identifying the mode in which responsibility is given in experience), comparative analysis (contrasting pedagogical and philosophical discourses), the method of paradoxalization (identifying internal contradictions of didactization), and conceptual modeling (constructing an alternative didactic strategy).

Results. It has been established that responsibility possesses an event-based, rather than substantial, nature: it does not exist in a latent state as an «ability» or «quality» but is actualized exclusively in the situation of responding to a challenge. Four fundamental paradoxes arising from the attempt to make responsibility an academic subject are identified: the paradox of transmission (knowledge is transmittable, responsibility is not), the paradox of assessment (responsibility, having become an object of evaluation, is supplanted by simulation), the paradox of the subject (traditional didactics produces bearers of competencies, not responsible subjects), and the paradox of time (education works with the completed past, responsibility is oriented toward an open future). It is demonstrated that these paradoxes are not technological but essential in nature and cannot be resolved by improving teaching methods. As an alternative, the concept of «responsivity didactics» is proposed, within which responsibility ceases to be the content of education and becomes its pervasive dimension, transforming three components: content (organized around problematic situations requiring a response), methods (prioritizing event-based formats), and the teacher's position (the teacher as a witness rather than a transmitter). It is concluded that responsibility can and should be present in education, not as a separate discipline, but as a mode of existence of education itself – open, event-based, and oriented toward the future.