The new Federal State Educational Standard and sociological imagination: A few words about poor sociological (and not demoscopic) education

Abstract

The article presents some thoughts about the reasons for the current extreme concern of the Russian professional sociological community about the model of training proposed by the Federal State Educational Standard of the fourth generation. In the first part of the article, the author briefly summarizes general problems of higher education, which are typical not only for the Russian university system but also, to one degree or another, for most national approaches to professional training (massification, commercialization, bureaucratization, digitalization, loss of university autonomy and institutional independence for the sake of socialeconomic reproduction, a decrease in the quality of training of future specialists and in the authority of the university teacher, etc.). In the second, main part of the article, the author refers to the respected sociological works and expert assessments to identify main reasons for the professional sociological community’s concern about the proposed radical change in the model of sociological training. Certainly, there is a number of obvious risks with “qualitative” variability, such as the priority of the political-science orientation, reduction in the volume of disciplines fundamentally important for sociological training, difficulty in mastering special professional competencies in a shorter period, unclear prospects for the full-time teaching staff of sociological departments, etc. However, the main danger is that the proposed model of sociological training would be unable to develop the main professional skill of the competent researcher (and not the demoscopist/practitioner) - sociological imagination, which requires longterm “slow reading” and constant methodological reflection.