Category of mentality has additional heuristic capabilities
as compared to traditional categories of the mental life. Firstly, it
serves as an integral characteristic of the uniqueness of the man’s
mental world, and secondly, gives an understanding of the specific
type of perception of the world by the subject, thirdly, it explains
the distinct way of subject’s activity – his behavior, communication,
performance. Because the mentality determines the mode of activity
of a social group or an individual; the human activity orientation
and it’s specificity, so the mentality can be interpreted as a core for
the group and personal culture, also as a strategic cultural program
of the subject. One of the basic clashes of society has the form of
a contradiction between the mentality, containing new cultural
forms, and the social relations. In the course of the individual
cultural creativity development as a response to the multiple challenges
of history, new mental characteristics are generated in the
mentality of the intellectual elite representatives. They represent
innovative programs of human being activity – performance, behavior,
communication. The new mental characteristics spread in
society and become components of group mentalities. This accrued
contradiction between the mass mentality and the old social relations
generates a constructive tension; negotiation the tension
through the reproductive activity of subjects can establish the more
progressive social relations. Old elements of mentality, in turn,
inherent social inertia and conservatism. They can obstruct the new
social relations establishment. Therefore, mentality has the contradictory
nature, embodying the dual opposition of tradition and
innovation. In the same time mentality is a social progress stimulating
factor, and a factor that holds back excessively large and excessively
rapid social changes. There is a difference between the mentality
of the creators of innovative cultural meanings and the mentality
of the masses. In the mentality of the creators that make up
the intelligent elite of the society, the innovational component is
more intense than the traditional. In the mentality of the masses
is vice versa - the traditional component dominates over the innovational.
There are many driving motives of the society development:
changes in a way of material production, in the culture in
general and in education in particular, in engineering, in science.
But the most significant force, apparently, displays the changes in
mentality that generate new forms of reproductive activity of the
subject in the economic, political, social and mental spheres.
The Internal Examination of Ideology and Politics Education in Colleges and Universities under the Perspective of Social Subject Research Method