Variations on a Theme of Mediation in Relation to the Concept of Liberal Education

Abstract

A purpose of the article is an attempt of answering the question, whether the institution of mediation can become a part of a system of liberal education assumptions by seeking shared and related meanings for them. The author of the article is deducing them from the subject of deliberations, which is focused on enlightenment characteristics of a free man responsible for creating his own reality. Due to rather insignificant scientific achievements of Polish pedagogical reflections concerning both mediation and liberal education, the following deliberations are considered unoriginal; simultaneously, becoming a possibility of entering into further discussions in the process.

It is not the author’s intention to describe liberal education and mediation from the perspective of effects of the formal education, system or course of study, but to focus on their properties, aimed at an intellectual, social and spiritual development of an individual. Therefore, liberal education is defined as the system of assumptions aimed at individual’s autonomous development focused on humanistic values. On the other hand, the literature on the subject emphasizes the co-occurrence of many semantic ranges of mediations, resulting, among others, from their authors’ adoption of different aims of the procedure of mediation, conditioning the shape of individual mediatory paradigms. Therefore, an operational research model of the mediatory paradigm, which considers important aims adopted in the article of mediation, conditioning the success and effectiveness of the mediatory discourse, constitutes an interpretation of the discussion.