Creating the Opportunity and Ability to Shape the Future: A Social and Cultural Response to the Challenges of Modern Education

This study is highly relevant today, as it responds to the need for a social and cultural strategy aimed at a systemic education overhaul in Russia, which would guarantee a high-quality education, boost the domestic economy, and help improve community life, culture, and overall well-being in the country. Therefore, the main goal of the paper is a critical analysis of the Club of Rome model and the New Enlightenment concept, representing future literacy. The core idea of our study is to propose an original alternative to the Club of Rome model, which differs from the latter and promotes the concept of providing students with the opportunity and ability to shape their future. We based this paper on systemic comparative practices and the retrospective method, which allowed us to single out and evaluate different viewpoints on the objectives, means, and forms of modernizing secondary and tertiary professional education in Russia and abroad, as well as set the methodological criteria for evaluating the role of education in society’s social and cultural development. We interpret the key components of changing the education paradigm by using an original content model, with adjustments for the criteria that we are profiling. The paper’s approach reveals the obstacles on the path towards developing Russian education, as well as the ways of overcoming them. The research is practice-oriented, and its results will address the needs of experts working for government authorities on a national and local level, and secondary and tertiary educational institutions, as well as experts on forecasting, introducing, and promoting digital technology (IT), and the creators of teaching methodologies and education process managers.