SOCIOCULTURAL ASPECTS OF BOLOGNA PROCESS

Under modern conditions no culture or country can isolate its development from other cultures and countries. Therefore, the present research focuses on sociocultural factors that stipulate Bologna process as well as its results and indicate an ambiguous character of changes undergoing in education. The theoretical basis of the research includes Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of chronotope as well as a special methodology of culture studies introduced by Vadim M. Rozin who presented such method as a logical sequence in certain stages of cognition. Institutional forms of European and Russian education have developed as two separate chronotopes which coincide only at a final stage in an industrial society of man-caused civilization. Since national education systems in post-Soviet area developed as a unified chronotope, we can assert that the described patterns of Russian higher education are characteristic of these systems as well. Modernization processes in education should not disrupt the weave of cultural traditions. Interference in or destruction of a single tradition without an adequate replacement can lead to a change in value scale and even to an intensification of negative trends in education system development. Under Bologna process, the resolutions and decisions concerning nostrification of diplomas in higher education are implemented to the largest extent while those concerning content selection - to the smallest. It is assumed that the system of credits and the systems of descriptors at a contemporary stage of Bologna process are the regulators of content in higher education. However, the existing system of credit transfer services the legal procedure of nostrification of diplomas in higher education. This means that a certain antinomy appeared under Bologna process. The key issue concerns the possible ways to preserve national and cultural peculiarities while modernizing education systems in this process. The presence of several regional education areas leads to a dilemma in the world education system development: whether the world education system is to have a more complex multilevel structure than it is stipulated by Bologna agreements, or the process of creating a unified world education system with unified parameters and unified organization structure is to develop more actively.