?
An Imperative of a Poorly Recognized Existential Risk: Early Socialization of Smart Young Generation in Information Society
The birth of this paper was motivated by the foundation in July 2013 of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge (UK). The first aim of the paper is to attract the attention of the researchers and educators throughout the world to a poorly recognized kind of existential risk: it is the dangerous consequences of misusing the information and communication technologies by adolescents in the context of permanently increasing intelligent capabilities of computers and an easy access to Internet. The second, principal aim of this paper is to propose a constructive way out: it is earlier than usually socialization of children in order to inscribe a deep awareness of social responsibility into the conceptual picture of the child and adolescent and to enable him/her to analyse the consequences of the fulfilled actions. The proposed way out is elaborated under the framework of a new scientific discipline called cognitonics. This way is provided by the System of the Methods of Emotional-Imaginative Teaching (the EIT-system). The constructive core of this paper consists of two parts. The first part considerably expands the Level of Consciousness model proposed by P.D. Zelazo in 2004. It considers fours levels of the development of conscious control of thought, emotion, and action and covers the child’s age from one to four years. Our model is based on the EIT-system and introduces three additional levels, where the seventh level is called the level of enhanced awareness of social agreements and social responsibility. Our model covers the ages from five – six to 13 – 14 years. The second part of this paper’s constructive core presents a new look at the process of education when the values of the student act like a lighthouse for the teacher at the moment of presenting material and arranging the process of education, the process of acquiring knowledge.