The Crisis of Ontology – the Challenge of Education

Abstract

The study is based on a reflection of the current dominant philosophy of education as an atomistically reduced understanding of reality. This reduction was highly productive in the Industrial Revolution and early modernity but also led to a limited ability to reflect educationally appropriate complex phenomena. At this point, the study relies primarily on Hejdánek's non-object and object thinking concepts. He sees the starting point in the notion of process and ecological ontology as contemplated by Arrow, Lakoff, and Latour. The study relies on Kuhn's model of the development of science. It builds on it by analysing two – existing in the school environment – phenomena, namely the global ecological crisis and the formation of identity, in which the emphasis on the entity concept leads to the impossibility of dealing with these phenomena. The final part of the study highlights selected conceptualisations that lead to the possibility of abandoning only the atomistic reduction of the ontological description of the world and offer perspectives of a more multiparadigmatic, processual understanding of education.