Philosophical and Methodological Challenges of Creativity

At all stages of its development, higher education considered the training of an educated specialist capable of improving their professional qualities, reproducing and expanding social experience, transforming the material conditions of society and its culture as well as accumulating and creating new values and knowledge as its main goal. At a certain stage, however, this social function of higher education – the formation and development of a creative personality of a specialist, became distorted, devalued, and lost its fundamental meaning. Higher education gradually began to lose its creative functions. The process of restructuring the political, spiritual, social, and economic life of society has posed new questions about the individual and the objective need for increasing the role of the creative personality. Studying the patterns of students’ thinking development, the peculiarities of their socialization under new conditions, and the realization of the creative abilities of the individual, while changing priorities and values, allows for predicting promising trends in the development of science, technology, and culture in the nearest future. An important methodological principle that should be embedded in the center of educational policy during the predicted period is the recognition that the progress of any society is measured by the ability to realize the essential capacities of individuals, their degrees of freedom, moral self-improvement, personal development, and the movement of society towards a new historical form of humanism. An individual in society should be free and retain the freedom of conscience, thought, skills, profession choice, cultural interests, aspirations, and priorities.