INTERPRETING APPROACHES TO EFFECTIVE CONTEMPORARY GENERAL EDUCATION THROUGH THE CONCEPT OF A MULTIVARIABLE COMPOSITE FUNCTION

This article examines social changes associated with the challenges of successive industrial revolutions and their influence on the organisation of general education. It explains the need to improve educational content, methods, and relationships among participants in the contemporary social environment, which the authors describe as a ‘techno-democratic information society’. Education is examined as a process of sharing human experience and as a system of interrelated structural elements. Relationships between the whole and its parts, and among the individual parts, influence educational outcomes. The authors proceed from the position that the effectiveness of general education depends on the interaction of several pedagogical, psychological, and social factors. This dependence is interpreted conceptually through the notion of a multivariable composite function. The main factors influencing educational effectiveness are identified, and the importance of addressing them in conjunction is discussed. The proposed approach is theoretical: the article neither calculates numerical parameters of the function nor empirically tests the model.