The Value of Knowledge and Learning

Happiness is a universal category describing all processes of human existence. Receiving education, acquiring knowledge is an important process of personal and civil formation. The research problem is solving by the authors is connected with the search of the role and possibility of gaining happiness in the process of education from the theoretical positions of philosophy, axiology, and sociology of culture. A review of felicitous theories and methods accentuates the inattention and methodological helplessness of the humanities in researching human happiness and its natural right. The authors believe that the statement and justification of the category of “feeling”, its introduction into the scientific turnover of socio-humanitarian disciplines is in demand in modern scientific practice. Modern pedagogical practice, limited to standards, instructions is quite far from the process of acquiring knowledge and self-disclosure of the student and teacher personalities in this process. It not only does not involve the release of feelings, but also poses a threat to the social order of society, violating the social position of the status of the interaction between teacher and student, “freezing” the meaning of the process of social inheritance requirements performance, transferring the educational process from the sphere of culture to the sphere of market relations. The value of knowledge is included in the value system of society and does not need to be evaluated. To realize the value potential of knowledge means to create conditions for the happy interaction of the main participants in this process – the carriers of the statuses “teacher” and “student”, but not to control the amount of this process and the cognitive energy allocated in this process. Knowledge may have terminal and instrumental meanings, but its main purpose is to serve the formation of personality, not to serve the controllers’ meanings of existence. Knowledge belongs to everyone; it is produced and open to all. The terminal knowledge is in the depths of a human personality, connecting him to the higher structures of experience. Learning aims towards awakening of such knowledge within a person. The meaning of the evaluation of this process is in the fact of the fulfillment of such awakening or the lack of desire for awakening. Knowledge is a cultural value that transcends the experience of a single individual or an entire community. Education is woven into the structures of social institutions by its knowledge (not just competence) component. The need for knowledge is one of the basic, vital needs of people.