Education as an Applied Value in the Philosophy of S.I. Hessen. Hessen, Sergey I., Slavonic Countries (Final Part), Trans. by Bryushinkina, Anna V., Comments and Publication by Zagirnyak, Mikhail Yu., Dmitrieva, Nina A.

In Sergey Hessen’s intellectual legacy, his works on the philosophy of education and pedagogy are topologically unified parts of a coherent philosophical and pedagogical doctrine, in which, in addition to purely educational and pedagogical strategies, the most important principles in understanding individual freedom, the common good, and the criteria for socio-cultural development are formulated. As is well known, Hessen considered pedagogy to be ‘applied philosophy’ – today we would say ‘philosophy of education’. In Hessen’s large corpus of pedagogical writings, we can distinguish ‘applied’ works (in the language of contemporary philosophy of science), in which he applies the principles proposed in his ‘theoretical’ works on the philosophy of education to analyse the potential and assess the prospects of existing state education systems in the countries of the contemporary world (the United States, Great Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the USSR, and Yugoslavia). The chapter “Slavic Countries”, published by Hessen in The Year Book of Education (1948), is one of his last ‘applied’ pedagogical works. In it, he focuses on the similarities in the organisation of the educational process in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugo­slavia and the USSR: on the coinciding interpretation of personal freedom, common good and general trends in the development of society and culture in these countries. The identified fundamental similarities allow Hessen to conclude that humanity has positive prospects, given that it advances along the path of mutual understanding and cooperation. In the preface to the publication of the translation of the chapter “Slavic Countries”, the authors answer the question of what conditions for ensuring and maintaining a balance between the personal and the ge­neral in the socio-cultural process Hessen formulates in his ‘theoretical’ works and uses in his ‘applied’ works.