Civic Competence in the Logic of Openness: A Phenomenological Approach

The article offers a phenomenological view on civic competency, openness of education, and values as type of competencies. The need for such a comparison is dictated by the discrepancy between the humanistic meanings of education and the social reality in which they are supposed to be implemented. It is assumed that a phenomenological perspective can present civic competency as a borderline connecting both the areas. This study is methodically supported by explication of the philosophical (transcendental-phenomenological) logic of the concept of openness. The appeal to openness, which is the essence of human subjectivity (autonomy), clarifies the substantive character of civic competency structure. Firstly, the study underlines the connection between openness and universalism as cultural principle (that is, in culture and through culture) of self-determination of the mind, constituting civic mindedness as a universal moral and legal modus of subjectivity. Bringing the civic idea to the competency range is the own task of education, which can be accomplished only in continuous actualization of the concept of openness. Secondly, the article proposes to consider the concept of value in the meaning of “type of competencies” according to the Council of Europe’s “Reference Framework of Competence for Democratic Culture” as a tool for crystallizing the self-determining mind into civic competency. Attention to this document is drawn by the coherence of openness and universalism with educational policies and practices, which is formalized in the pedagogical design of values as a type of competence. The study’s argumentation confirms this connection and ascertains that an open edu­cational system is defined in its essence not by a set of accessible educational environment technologies, but by the depth of its rooting in the logic of openness. Thirdly, the actualization of values as a type of competence in the logic of openness provides an opportunity for phenomenological designing of pedagogical technologies. The essential idea of this approach is that civic competency can be constituted as a semantic determination of different types of subject knowledge and, through their correction, can transform broad social contexts. As an example of that sort of transformative participation, the article presents the values’ influence on the strengthening of human capital in aggregation of new technologies and inequality.