Introduction to Max Sheller's philosophy of education: reformed governance of higher education as a source of sustainable development of civil society

Abstract

Max Sheler published his work "University and Public's University" in 1921 in Germany during the period of the history when this state  was in a state of social crisis. Having suffered a deep defeat in World War I, Germany gained serious economic, financial and domestic political problems. But the main problem for the then Germany was the crisis of social morality of the German people which had lost the traditional factors of their social integration and solidarity. Max Scheler postulated reformed higher education, that would be able  to have positive  influence upon the German society, primarily because of its educational influence on representatives of working youth, as a cultural alternative to those fallen factors. According to Max Scheler the reforming of higher education, as constructing a "public's university", had to be carried out primarily through the renewal of the leadership of educational institutions and through the involvement of new young teachers into the educational process whose main work was upbringing of students through the provision of appropriate knowledge. This knowledge must consist in such a way to combine humanitarian and professional disciplines, which will result in the formation of a young worker as an active participant of the development of the post-war German society as democratic one and it will make impossible for any ideology to influence its conscious life. Max Scheler called the personal spirit of a man to be the internal factor that determines his or her pedagogical and educational activities. Those educators who understand the presence of a personal spirit in them will carry out their pedagogical activities, focusing on the idea of spiritual national unity. The result of such pedagogical activities will be the constant constructing of the civil society by a new personality, who was brought up within out-ideological education.