Value structure as the basis of social cognition and determining of the quality of higher education

Abstract

Values serve as the grounds for implementation of social cognition in general and social foresight in particular. Values are composite structures of social relevance, including elements of value structures as a characteristic of different social formations. Foresight processes about higher education and its quality should be based on a study of the university community values. Phenomenological sociology offers a carefully designed concept of the structures of social relevance. Schütz considers relevant systems theory as theory of se lective activity of the mind. He  istinguishes thematic, interpretative and motivational relevance, each of which, as we prove, has a valuable meaning. Social prediction needs to have not epistemological, but praxeological solution. For selection of the desired the individual made a choice within a given, pre-given social system of relevance. The anticipation of higher education in general and foresight of its quality including may receive the best interpretation with the characteristics of Schütz’s "ultimate field values". It is important to understand the interconnectedness of individual and social relevance: the latter thanks to the mechanism, in particular, of a social memory, acts in relation to the individual as an objective, a priori given. Really new experience does not always provide the productive modification of conventional interpretation schemes. Often it only leads to the destruction of existing schemes and creates a virtual reality system offering pseudo-relevance, the system of semantic relationships that not only have no correlation with the actual behavior of people, but also counteracts such behavior. Academic values should grow from everyday experience of the members of the university community – only in this case it gets chances for implementation in the future.