MENTAL EDUCATION OF PERSONALITY IN THE PEDAGOGICAL HERITAGE OF KOSTIANTYN USHYNSKYI

The article reveals the concept of mental education, its purpose and content. Teachers of the past and the present devoted their works to the study of mental education. Mental education is responsible for the formation of a certain amount of students’ knowledge, for their critical attitude to the ways of thinking. It is determined that formation of a scientific world outlook of the personality is one of the tasks of mental education. Language culture is of great importance in the mental education of the personality. K. Ushynskyi determines the physiological and psychological foundations of language and its importance in the mental development of the personality. He emphasizes the importance of national language, as well as the importance of learning a foreign one. An important role in the mental education of the personality belongs to the attention, which is considered to be a culture of mental work. The teacher determines active and passive attention; he believes that attention induces a child to the independent cognitive activity. The scientist paid a lot of attention to the reasonableness, which helped to develop students' sense. According to K. Ushynskyi, a child must be able to read and speak well, he/she must be able to express his/her opinion for mental education. The child must have knowledge of the basics of religion and also the knowledge of Motherland. The educational material must give a child the knowledge which should be built into the system, and which the child should accumulate during his/her learning. The teacher gives great importance in mental education to visual learning, which should accompany the child during his/her learning. The teacher emphasizes that the child must be able to analyze, to think, to express his/her opinion about separate objects, must be able to compare them with each other. In his pedagogical activity, K. Ushynskyi aspired to integrate educational material. The scientist offers to use an integrative method of teaching, to carry out simple experiments, to be able to tell about them, to give examples. The basis of mental education is the harmonious and comprehensive development of personality. K. Ushinsky pays attention in mental education to the experience of the personality. This experience is accumulated during carrying-out of various mental actions and it is preserved in human memory.