Humanism without a Subject: The Crisis of the Humanistic Paradigm in Education

Contemporary education is undergoing a paradoxical transformation: while professing allegiance to humanistic ideals, it systematically loses sight of the living person. This article explores the fundamental disconnect between the legally enshrined rhetoric of “human-centeredness” and the actual practices that reduce the individual to a statistical unit, a competence profile, or “human capital”. The author posits that this situation is not a temporary malfunction but a profound value shift. Tracing the tradition from Socratic dialogue to 20 th -century personalism, the work reconstructs the genealogy of classical humanism. Its core has always been a “humanism of demand” – a respectful expectation of the subject’s capacity for effort, autonomy, and moral choice. The study’s central thesis i s the diagnosis of an anthropological inversion: the “subject of development” is being supplanted by the “human-as-condition”. The article reveals the mechanisms of this substitution – the universalization of trauma and the absolutization of emotional experience – which, paradoxically, coalesce into a new form of unfreedom. It demonstrates how care devoid of demand leads to infantilization, and support without the expectation of effort results in depotentiation. However, the work is not limited to critique. It substantiates the necessity of synthesizing two modes of humanism: the “humanism of demand” and the “humanism of condition”. True inclusivity, the author argues, is achievable only by maintaining this tension, where the recognition of vulnerability is coupled with faith in a person’s capacity for transformation. The article outlines the contours of a “pedagogy of faith”: from revising the criteria for success and de-automatizing communication to rehabilitating the category of effort and restoring the student’s authorship of their own educational trajectory. Humanism without a subject proves to be not merely a theoretical dead end, but a challenge that demands a fundamental reassembly of the very ontology of education.